The CRU graph. Note that it
is calibrated in tenths of a degree Celsius and that even that tiny
amount of warming started long before the late 20th century. The
horizontal line is totally arbitrary, just a visual trick. The whole
graph would be a horizontal line if it were calibrated in whole degrees
-- thus showing ZERO warming

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist instinct") in
many people that causes them to delight in going without material
comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such people --
with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example. Many
Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that instinct
too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious committments they
have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them to live in an
ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them to press on us
all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The blogspot version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Dissecting Leftism. For a list of backups viewable at times when the main blog is "down", see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing) See here or here for the archives of this site
****************************************************************************************

31 December, 2015

Totally empty Warmist thinking

The puff below appeared in The New Daily,
which aspires to be a serious newspaper. It was headed "Why
Australia is sitting on a clean energy goldmine" and was written by Rob
Burgess, their economics commentator and previously a journalist
on Left-leaning newspapers.

I looked forward to hearing what
particular activity or resource Australia had that would give it the
great advantage claimed. Do we have rare earth metals in
abundance? Do we make very efficient solar cells? Do we make
better wind turbines? I knew in advance that the answers to those
question would be No, so what was it that had I not thought of or what
was it that did I not know?

I was disappointed entirely.
All there is below are conventional prophecies and some very airy
generalities that are well known but are in no way explicitly tied
to the subject at hand.

Take this sentence:

"The
expertise we develop in energy efficiency, renewable technologies, power
grid management and transport networks can be exported to nations
trying to catch up".

That is just a pious hope with no evidence or argument offered that it is happening or will happen.

Mr
Burgess clearly has nothing to say but says it at length. But Warmist
thinking is generally brainless so I don't suppose I should have been
surprised

Australia has for a long time become convinced that it ‘got lucky’ via
the mining boom, and that the subsequent boost in national income and
household wealth could not be generated any other way – a defeatist
position that would make industrial nations such as Germany and Japan,
or newly-industrialised Malaysia, cringe.

That’s because their growth stories are not put down to ‘luck’ but to
successful deployment of financial capital, innovation, development of
human capital, and transparent and stable systems of governance.

Australia’s new comparative advantage, then, will be found in acknowledging how far along the non-luck path we are.

Despite pockets of deprivation, Australia is still one of the wealthiest
nations in the world and its people rank second only to the Norwegians
on the United Nation’s human development index.

The USA is eighth, the UK 14th and Japan 20th, by way of comparison.

Our rule of law, and stable and well-regulated financial markets, make
Australia an excellent place to invest, meaning financing our renewable
energy future will be easier and cheaper than for developing nations.

And to those advantages – strong human capital and attractiveness to
investors – can be added a growing recognition that services exports
will form a large part of our future economic growth.

The expertise we develop in energy efficiency, renewable technologies,
power grid management and transport networks can be exported to nations
trying to catch up.

Oh, and there’s a bit of luck too – we have excellent natural resources
to develop in renewable energy areas such as solar, wind, wave, biomass
and biofuels. We also have huge scope to offset future carbon emissions
via carbon forestry.

In short, Australia is sitting on a carbon-free goldmine. We are smart
enough, wealthy enough, export-oriented enough, well governed enough and
blessed enough in natural resources to be ahead of the curve in the
transition to clean energy.
The five-year challenge

At the heart of the Paris agreement is a five-yearly ‘stocktake’ of how
each nation is doing with meeting its self-nominated targets.

Australia took a very modest target to Paris at the end of November, but
it will now face five-yearly check-ups to see if, firstly, it has met
the target, and, secondly, whether it will offer a stronger target for
the next five years.

As the US, China and others strengthen their targets, they will not idly
disregard laggard nations – the threat of trade measures such as
‘border tax adjustments‘, are the means by which ‘non-binding’ pledges
will, in effect, be made binding.

Also, as with all 195 nations who have signed up to the Paris agreement,
Australia is committed to globally binding transparency measures – that
is, we can’t fake our carbon emissions.

But why would we?

The tide of history is running, strongly. The arguments put forward by
the fossil-fuel lobby, the Abbott government, and a few King Canute-like
backers in the media, have been lost.

Yes, Australia has among the highest per-capita carbon emissions in the
world, and the highest carbon-intensity per unit of GDP. So we have more
work to do than comparable nations to keep up with the post-COP21 pack.

But the point that must not be missed is that those reductions will be easier here than just about anywhere.

It is our new comparative advantage.

And though it’s based partly on luck, to capitalise on it we will need
world-beating innovation, business acumen, policy responses and, most
importantly, a voting public given the full facts of where the tide of
history is flowing, rather than the unworthy fear campaigns of the past
few years.

Myth: The human population is growing exponentially (and we're doomed)

This belief is a favorite of the Green/Left. The example of Malthus does not deter them

Fears about overpopulation began with Reverend Thomas Malthus in 1798,
who predicted that unchecked exponential population growth would lead to
famine and poverty.

But the human population has not and is not growing exponentially and is
unlikely to do so, says Joel Cohen, a populations researcher at the
Rockefeller University in New York City. The world’s population is now
growing at just half the rate it was before 1965. Today there are an
estimated 7.3 billion people, and that is projected to reach 9.7 billion
by 2050. Yet beliefs that the rate of population growth will lead to
some doomsday scenario have been continually perpetuated. Celebrated
physicist Albert Bartlett, for example, gave more than 1,742 lectures on
exponential human population growth and the dire consequences starting
in 1969.

The world's population also has enough to eat. According to the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the rate of global food
production outstrips the growth of the population. People grow enough
calories in cereals alone to feed between 10 billion and 12 billion
people. Yet hunger and malnutrition persist worldwide. This is because
about 55% of the food grown is divided between feeding cattle, making
fuel and other materials or going to waste, says Cohen. And what remains
is not evenly distributed — the rich have plenty, the poor have little.
Likewise, water is not scarce on a global scale, even though 1.2
billion people live in areas where it is.

“Overpopulation is really not overpopulation. It's a question about
poverty,” says Nicholas Eberstadt, a demographer at the American
Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank based in Washington DC.
Yet instead of examining why poverty exists and how to sustainably
support a growing population, he says, social scientists and biologists
talk past each other, debating definitions and causes of overpopulation.

Cohen adds that “even people who know the facts use it as an excuse not
to pay attention to the problems we have right now”, pointing to the
example of economic systems that favour the wealthy.

Like others interviewed for this article, Cohen is less than optimistic
about the chances of dispelling the idea of overpopulation and other
ubiquitous myths, but he agrees that it is worthwhile to try to prevent
future misconceptions. Many myths have emerged after one researcher
extrapolated beyond the narrow conclusions of another's work. That
“interpretation creep”, as Spitzer calls it, can lead to misconceptions
that are hard to excise. To prevent that, “we can make sure an
extrapolation is justified, that we're not going beyond the data”,
suggests Spitzer. Beyond that, it comes down to communication, says
Howard-Jones. Scientists need to be effective at communicating ideas and
get away from simple, boiled-down messages.

It would be hard to find anyone in all of America who has been more wrong on the American energy story than Barack Obama.

Oil prices have fallen from $105 a barrel in the summer of 2014 to
hovering at $35 a barrel today. That’s a two-thirds reduction in the
price and the biggest factor is shale oil brought to you by fracking. In
many areas of the country gas is now less than $2 a gallon and it could
fall further in the weeks ahead.

The falling price means, of course, an expanded supply. But now listen
to President Obama, who has lectured the nation on energy as if he were
one of the top experts for the last eight years.

In a 2008 Speech in Lansing, Michigan, presidential candidate Obama was
all doom and gloom about oil, advising: “We cannot sustain a future
powered by a fuel that is rapidly disappearing.”

Then in 2010 from the Oval Office he solemnly declared: “We’re running
out of places to drill,” and he jeered that the oil and gas industry
might want to start pumping for oil near the Washington Monument.

During a 2011 weekly address he referred to oil and gas as “yesterday’s” energy sources.

Then during a speech at Georgetown University, he pontificated: “The
United States of America cannot afford to bet our long-term prosperity,
our long-term security on a resource (oil) that will eventually run
out.”

By the way this discredited Malthusian belief that we are running out of
oil is still widely believed by many scientists and pundits as well.
Paul Krugman of The New York Times wrote in 2010 that “the world is fast
approaching the inevitable peaking” of global oil production and that
“world commodity prices are telling us that we’re living in a finite
world.”

That was when prices were abnormally high. So if high prices tell us we
are running out, then obviously low prices must tell us supply is
rising.

These stupid predictions of the end of oil have been going on for most
of the last century. Just over 100 years ago, the U.S. Bureau of Mines
estimated total future production at 6 billion barrels, yet we’ve
produced more than 20 times that amount. In 1939 the Department of the
Interior predicted U.S. oil supplies would last 13 years. I could go on.

The wonder is that smart people like Nobel prize winners Krugman and
Obama haven’t learned anything from history and instead keep
regurgitating these myths about “running out.”

The folks at the Institute for Energy Research recently published a
study showing three data points: first, the government’s best estimate
of how much oil we had in America 50 years ago.

The second was how much U.S. oil has been drilled out of the ground
since then. And the third is how much reserves there are now. Today we
have twice as many reserves as we had in 1950. And we have already
produced almost 10 times more oil than the government told us we had
back then.

Technology and innovation account for the constant upping the amount of
“finite” oil we can produce. We discover new sources of oil much faster
than we deplete the known amount of reserves and so for all practical
purposes, oil and natural gas supplies are nearly inexhaustible.
Fracking is the latest game changer and the access it gives us to shale
oil and gas resources has virtually doubled over night. And this
technology boom in drilling is just getting started.

My point is how absurd it is for Americans to blindly trust any
“scientific consensus” on any of these natural resource or environmental
issues. The credibility of the alarmists is just shot. In 1980,
hundreds of the top scientists in the United States issued a report
called “The Global 2000 Report to the President” — which was a primal
scream that in every way life on earth would be worse by 2000 because
the world would run out of oil, gas, food, farmland and so on.

My mentor Julian Simon and Herman Kahn challenged this conventional
wisdom. Today they would be disparaged as “deniers.” Yet on every score
these iconoclasts were right and the green scientific consensus was
wrong.

Lately, even Mr. Obama doesn’t make the ridiculous claim that we have to
use green energy because we are running out of oil. Instead he
now says we should keep our super-abundance of oil “in the ground,” even
as he tries take credit for the low prices.

In reality, if we do what Mr. Obama wants, gas at the pump and
electricity are going to be more expensive. If you don’t like $1.89
gasoline at the pump, you’re probably a big fan of the Obama
energy/climate change agenda.

Hopefully, the neo-Malthusians like Mr. Obama will stop resorting to the
century long false fear that we are running our of oil as an excuse for
using much more expensive and much less efficient “green energy.”

Many years ago I was quoted in The New York Times as making this point
about our infinite oil supply and a high school science teacher wrote me
and huffed: “Even my 14 year olds know that oil is finite.”This teacher
is probably now a top science advisor to Mr. Obama.

In an interview at the close of the recent Paris climate conference,
Secretary of State John Kerry scolded Republican senators for saying out
loud that the next president may not be a big supporter of President
Barack Obama’s climate policies. Kerry asserted voters won’t allow a
change, “I don’t think they’re going to accept as a genuine leader
someone who doesn’t understand the science of climate change and isn’t
willing to do something about it.”

But Kerry disproves his own theory. In a widely covered speech in
Jakarta, Indonesia Kerry gave an absolutely cringe-worthy explanation of
CO2 and global warming. Of course the press totally ignored his
bizarre CO2 science lesson:

“I know sometimes I can remember from when I was in high school and
college, some aspects of science or physics can be tough – chemistry.
But this is not tough. This is simple. Kids at the earliest age can
understand this.

“Try and picture a very thin layer of gases – a quarter-inch, half an
inch, somewhere in that vicinity – that’s how thick it is. It’s in our
atmosphere. It’s way up there at the edge of the atmosphere. And for
millions of years – literally millions of years – we know that layer has
acted like a thermal blanket for the planet – trapping the sun’s heat
and warming the surface of the Earth to the ideal, life-sustaining
temperature. Average temperature of the Earth has been about 57 degrees
Fahrenheit, which keeps life going.”

He probably should have stopped with “physics can be tough.” His “a
quarter-inch way up there” absolutely does not describe CO2 in the
atmosphere. It seems what Kerry had in mind is a very abstract
representation of the ozone layer. This may have been relevant a long
time ago in a debate far, far away, but it is not a description of CO2
in the atmosphere.

His notion that the Earth has had a steady temperature for “literally
millions of years” is also way off base. This National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration webpage shows temperatures have bounced
around by 10-25 degrees Fahrenheit ten or so times in the last 800,000
years.

Who knows what Kerry’s aides were thinking as he recited his mixed-up
ozone lecture in the carbon dioxide forum? You can almost imagine them
trying to catch Kerry’s attention, “Psst! We are talking about CO2, not
O3.”

Climate models used by scientists to predict how much human activities
will warm the planet have been over-predicting global warming for the
last six decades, according to a recent working paper by climate
scientists.

“Everyone by now is familiar with the ‘pause’ or ‘slowdown’ in the rate
of global warming that has taken place over the past 20 years of so, but
few realize is that the observed warming rate has been beneath the
model mean expectation for periods extending back to the mid-20th
century—60+ years,” Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger, climate
scientists at the libertarian Cato Institute, write in a working paper
released in December.

Michaels and Knappenberger compared observed global surface temperature
warming rates since 1950 to what was predicted by 108 climate models
used by government climate scientists to predict how much carbon dioxide
emissions will warm the planet.

What they found was the models projected much higher warming rates than actually occurred.

“During all periods from 10 years (2006-2015) to 65 (1951-2015) years in
length, the observed temperature trend lies in the lower half of the
collection of climate model simulations,” Michaels and Knappenberger
write, “and for several periods it lies very close (or even below) the
2.5th percentile of all the model runs.”

To further bolster their case that climate models are over-predicting
warming rates, Michaels and Knappenberger looked at how climate models
fared against satellite and weather balloon data from the
mid-troposphere. The result is the same, and climate models predicted
way more warming than actually occurred.

“This is a devastating indictment of climate model performance,”
Michaels and Knappenberger write. “For periods of time longer than about
20 years, the observed trends from all data sources fall beneath the
lower bound which contains 95 percent of all model trends and in the
majority of cases, falls beneath even the absolute smallest trend found
in any of the 102 climate model runs.”

“The amount of that over-prediction comports well with a growing body of
scientific findings and growing understanding that the sensitivity of
the earth’s surface temperature to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas
levels… lies towards (and yet within) the low end of the mainstream
assessed likely range.”

Satellite temperatures, which measure the lowest few miles of the
Earth’s atmosphere, show there’s been no significant global warming for
the last two decades despite rapidly rising carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere.

The so-called “hiatus” in warming has sparked an intense debate among
climate scientists over what’s caused warming to disappear. Dozens of
theories have been put forward as to why global warming has stalled, but
no one has cracked the case.

Michaels and Knappenberger, however, suggest the “hiatus” and the
previous decades of overblown temperature predictions point to a huge
flaw in climate science: the climate isn’t as sensitive to CO2 as
previously thought.

The Cato scientists argue “climate sensitivity” estimates are too high
and are causing climate models to over-predict how much warming will
happen with increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Climate sensitivity
refers to how much warming would occur with a doubling of atmospheric
greenhouse gas concentrations.

Climate scientists typically put climate sensitivity at 3 degrees
Celsius, but a slew of new studies suggest that’s way too high an
estimate based on how much warming has been observed in recent decades.
One estimate put together by the U.K.-based Global Warming Policy
Foundation last year found climate sensitivity may be as low as 1.75
degrees Celsius — almost half what mainstream climate models use.

Conservative lawmakers, scholars, and activists say it’s time for the
Virginia General Assembly to look into the taxpayer funding of academics
and scientists who don’t want President Obama to tolerate dissenting
views on climate change.

The question, they told The Daily Signal, is why taxpayers should pay
for the work of radical academics and scientists who want Obama to
launch a racketeering investigation of organizations that have an open
mind on how much mankind contributes to global warming.

“I’m just not sure about where we are right now on the question of
climate change,” said Angela Chellew, a legislative liaison in the
Virginia House of Delegates.

“I’ve been reading about sea level rise near where I live off Norfolk,”
Chellew said, “but then I read conflicting things about what it all
means. I do think we need to be careful about how we spend our taxpayer
dollars and how government regulations will impact average people.”

Chellew and other climate change skeptics spoke to The Daily Signal
during the 2014 Republican Advance, a weekend retreat held at the Omni
Homestead in Hot Springs.

About 500 Virginia legislators and party activists attended Dec. 12,
even as hundreds of government officials and delegates from across the
globe gathered in Paris to reach an international pact to counter
climate change.

Rick Buchanan, chairman-elect of the Virginia Tea Party Patriots Federation, agreed with Chellew.

As the federal government continues to pump billions of dollars into
activities related to climate change, Buchanan said, he is concerned
that it subjects honest scientific inquiry to a highly politicized
process.

Between 1993 and 2013, the U.S. government spent more than $165 billion
on global warming or climate change issues, according to federal
reports.

“I’m what you call a scientific skeptic,” Buchanan told The Daily
Signal, adding: "I’ve studied the issue very carefully, and there’s
plenty of science out there that refutes the theory of man-made global
warming. But government officials are still racing ahead with very
expensive regulations".

Government funding of climate change research is a big part of the
problem because it tends to fuel global warming alarmism that isn’t
rooted in sound science, Rep. Robert Wittman, R-Va., said in an
interview with The Daily Signal.

“Scientists should be in a position where they can freely pursue
research without any strings attached,” Wittman said. “But the
government funding can have a chilling effect on the scientific method.”

Wittman, a candidate for Virginia governor who has a background as a
biologist, said he would like to see more attention focused on ice cores
and tree rings. Both, he said, point to significant periods of global
warming in earth’s past, before the emergence of human industrial
activity.

The recent United Nations Conference of Parties, also known as COP21,
produced the Paris Agreement, a pact described as legally binding on
nations in some respects but voluntary in others. The stated goal:
limiting the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees C (or 3.6 degrees
F) by the end of the 21st century.

Obama’s representative was among more than 190 government ministers who
adopted the pact by consensus. But the agreement’s restrictions on
carbon dioxide would cost American consumers and businesses a pretty
penny in higher energy bills, warned Nicolas Loris, a Heritage
Foundation economist.

Contrary to what Obama and other government leaders have told the
public, Loris argued, the most reliable scientific data show Earth is
not heading toward a climate crisis and that natural forces, not human
activity, are at work.

‘A State Tradition’

John Taylor, president of the Virginia Institute for Public Policy, told
The Daily Signal that the Virginia General Assembly particularly ought
to investigate the tens of millions of taxpayer dollars, including
state funds, that went to the work of a George Mason University
professor specializing in atmospheric, oceanic, and earth studies.

That professor, Jagadish Shukla, led a recent call for the Obama
administration to prosecute climate change skeptics. “Unfortunately,
double-dipping is nothing new in the state of Virginia,” Taylor said.
“In fact, it is a state tradition. We have college professors and
commonwealth attorneys in the General Assembly, and this has been going
on for some time.”

Many Virginia residents and leaders don’t buy into what they consider
alarmist claims about man-made global warming, interviews at the
Republican retreat confirmed. Even so, state taxpayers may not know they
fund political activism that not only advances “alarmist” theories, but
works to silence, marginalize, and even criminalize dissent.

That much became apparent earlier this year when 20 taxpayer-funded
academics from Virginia’s George Mason University and other public
universities from across the country signed a letter to Obama and
Attorney General Loretta Lynch calling for criminal investigations of
scientists and organizations that disagree with the administration’s
position on global warming.

Shukla was the first of the 20 public employees to sign the letter to
Obama calling for a probe of “corporations and other organizations
that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of
climate change.”

They asked for the probes under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO.

Also signing the so-called RICO 20’s letter were five of Shukla’s
colleagues at George Mason University and academics from the University
of Washington in Seattle, Rutgers University in New Jersey, the
University of Maryland, Florida State University, the University of
Texas at Austin, and Columbia University. All are publicly funded
universities.

As previously reported by The Daily Signal, a U.S. House committee
wants to know more about Shukla’s work and the relationship between
taxpayer money received by the academics and their urging of Obama to
use racketeering law to go after businesses and other groups that oppose
his climate change agenda.

The India-born Shukla, 71, is the founder of the Rockville, Md.-based
Institute of Global Environment and Society, a nonprofit that received
$63 million in taxpayer funds since 2001, according to financial data
first compiled by the Washington Free Beacon. The $63 million accounts
for over 98 percent of his environmental institute’s revenue in that
time.

Critics say Shukla broke the law governing nonprofit groups by calling
for the RICO investigation. They say the professor also appears to have
violated George Mason University’s stipulations against conflict of
interest as well as rules for federal grant recipients who work for
universities.

One such critic is Ron Arnold, who has written about Shukla and his
environmental institute at LeftExposed.Org, a project of the Heartland
Institute.

Shukla receives a six-figure salary at George Mason University. He and
most of the other George Mason academics who signed the RICO 20’s letter
did not respond to The Daily Signal’s request earlier this year for
examples of scientific skeptics who “knowingly deceived” the public
about the risks of global warming.

A George Mason spokesman also did not respond to requests for comment on
whether the university had concerns about Shukla’s environmental
institute and whether it was confident he operated within school
guidelines.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, chairman of the House Committee on Science,
Space and Technology, questioned Shukla in a letter and followed up with
a separate letter to Shukla’s attorney asking for related financial
documents.

Shukla’s environmental institute, Smith wrote to the professor, “appears
to be almost fully funded by taxpayer money while simultaneously
participating in partisan political activities by requesting a [federal]
investigation of companies and organizations that disagree with the
Obama administration on climate change.”

“Our staff has been in regular contact with GMU and Mr. Shukla’s
attorney and are continuing to look into the matter,” a committee aide
said in an email to The Daily Signal. “We don’t have anything to
publicly report at this time.”

‘No Further Response’

Paul Dirmeyer is another of the six George Mason University professors
who signed the RICO 20 letter. Dirmeyer is a meteorologist who
researches the role of the land surface in the climate system.

“Some press reports have distorted what the letter stated and its
context,” Dirmeyer said in an email to The Daily Signal. He said a
blog post by Barry Klinger, another George Mason professor who signed
the letter, “clarifies several points.”

“Further background that may answer your questions may be found in an
article in Science or references therein,” Sirmeyer said in the email.
“I will have no further response.”

The Virginia Institute for Public Policy describes its mission as
promoting policies that uphold the rule of law and constitutional
limited government.

Taylor, the organization’s president, said he faults the Republican
Party for not doing more to dismantle incestuous relationships between
academics and government agencies as well as similar arrangements that
give rise to conflicts of interests, wasteful spending, and bloated
bureaucracies that burden taxpayers.

“Every time the Republicans come to power they leave the infrastructure
the Democrats put into place untouched,” Taylor said. “This way when the
Democrats come back into power, they just pick up right where they left
off.”

With the Virginia General Assembly set to convene its 2016 legislative
session on Jan. 13, Marc Morano, editor of Climate Depot and producer of
the new film “Climate Hustle,” said he sees an opportunity to push back
against the infrastructure Taylor describes.

“Since George Mason is a state university, the relevant government
oversight should be taken,” Morano said in an email to The Daily Signal.
“What Shukla has done may be the tip of the iceberg.”

“The funding of climate and climate-related studies by the U.S.
government are now fueled by studying man’s influence on climate,”
Morano told The Daily Signal. “And the researcher had better not have in
mind any notion of challenging the politically imposed orthodoxy that
mankind is driving dangerous climate change.”

He added:

"Study after study seems to be just a series of models-based predictions
of the future. In fact, they use model predictions to counter the
current data, which shows mankind’s influence on climate is not even
measurable. The prediction studies can claim ‘it is worse than we
thought’ not because current data is showing that, but because
predictions of 50 to 100 years out are now more dire and thus ‘worse
than we thought.’

“If a scientist publishes something ‘off message’ from the warmist
narrative, they quickly find out that their results are not welcome,” he
said. “Renowned scientists like hurricane expert Dr. Bill Gray found
out that when you challenge skepticism, your federal funding dries up.”

Rep. Randy Forbes, R-Va., one of several Republican congressmen who
addressed the Advance gathering, told The Daily Signal that the letter
to Obama from Shukla and the other academics encourages action to thwart
freedom of speech.

“I’m not real big on having investigations into what people think,”
Forbes said. “We have the First Amendment. So let’s have a full, fair,
open debate, and [let] the pieces fall where they may.”

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

30 December, 2015

Toon time

Another example of scientists getting it wrong

Even if 97% of scientists DID support global warming, it would not be
very convincing. Scientists have been getting it wrong at least
since the phlogiston theory. Rejection of continental drift, peak oil,
global cooling etc.

In 1997, physicians in southwest Korea began to offer ultrasound
screening for early detection of thyroid cancer. News of the programme
spread, and soon physicians around the region began to offer the
service. Eventually it went nationwide, piggybacking on a government
initiative to screen for other cancers. Hundreds of thousands took the
test for just US$30–50.

Across the country, detection of thyroid cancer soared, from 5 cases per
100,000 people in 1999 to 70 per 100,000 in 2011. Two-thirds of those
diagnosed had their thyroid glands removed and were placed on lifelong
drug regimens, both of which carry risks.

Such a costly and extensive public-health programme might be expected to
save lives. But this one did not. Thyroid cancer is now the most common
type of cancer diagnosed in South Korea, but the number of people who
die from it has remained exactly the same — about 1 per 100,000. Even
when some physicians in Korea realized this, and suggested that thyroid
screening be stopped in 2014, the Korean Thyroid Association, a
professional society of endocrinologists and thyroid surgeons, argued
that screening and treatment were basic human rights.

In Korea, as elsewhere, the idea that the early detection of any cancer saves lives had become an unshakeable belief.

This blind faith in cancer screening is an example of how ideas about
human biology and behaviour can persist among people — including
scientists — even though the scientific evidence shows the concepts to
be false. “Scientists think they're too objective to believe in
something as folklore-ish as a myth,” says Nicholas Spitzer, director of
the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind at the University of California,
San Diego. Yet they do.

These myths often blossom from a seed of a fact — early detection does
save lives for some cancers — and thrive on human desires or anxieties,
such as a fear of death. But they can do harm by, for instance, driving
people to pursue unnecessary treatment or spend money on unproven
products. They can also derail or forestall promising research by
distracting scientists or monopolizing funding. And dispelling them is
tricky.

Scientists should work to discredit myths, but they also have a
responsibility to try to prevent new ones from arising, says Paul
Howard-Jones, who studies neuroscience and education at the University
of Bristol, UK. “We need to look deeper to understand how they come
about in the first place and why they're so prevalent and persistent.”

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, in an exercise of warmist wishful
thinking a few weeks ago, warned banks and by extension energy companies
of the problem of “stranded” assets, left without value by
environmental regulation. Naturally, this was just part of the threats
and bluster designed to change behavior ahead of the Paris global
warming conference. However I thought it worth considering whether the
concept of stranded assets had any validity, and in what circumstances.
My conclusion is that the stranded asset concept is valid but that
current low energy prices greatly reduce their danger.

In essence, the concept of stranded assets is similar to the Austrian
economic concept of “malinvestment.” In every economic cycle, some
investments will be made which turn out in retrospect to have been a
mistake. Those investments have to be liquidated at a loss or in some
cases for no return at all, and the debt secured against them is
generally lost.

There are three major reasons why malinvestment takes place. One is
sheer bloody stupidity on the part of the investor, generally when a
stock market or real estate bubble is in effect, pumped up by
artificially easy money and low interest rates. A gigantic amount of
malinvestment will undoubtedly have been caused by the zero interest
rate policies of the Fed and other central banks since 2008. For
example, the hotel sector has seen year after year of massive investment
in new properties, with supply running far ahead of the most optimistic
realistic projections for vacation and business travel demand.

Capitalism cannot work if the risk free real cost of capital is
negative, because in that case any investment, even one with zero
return, is attractive. As I discussed in an earlier piece when looking
at the possibility of the Fed abolishing cash and pushing interest rates
substantially negative, it would then be attractive to build ziggurats
or other religious buildings with no monetary return and no resale value
– you could live off the interest you received on the debt used to
finance them.

A second form of malinvestment is that incurred when prices move
dramatically and unexpectedly, as with the recent halving of oil prices.
In this case, the investors are unlucky rather than stupid; if oil
prices stay at $100 a barrel for several years, and everyone in the
market has endless reasons why their future trend will be up, not down,
then it is not necessarily foolish to make heavy investments in fracking
opportunities that require an oil price of $70 per barrel to be viable.
However the result is the same as if you had been foolish; if oil
prices drop to $40 a barrel and stay there, as appears to have happened,
then all that fracking investment has been wasted and needs to be
removed from the market and written off.

The combination of these two forms of foolish and unlucky investment is
currently causing severe problems in the junk bond market, which are
likely to continue. Energy related investments that depended on $70 oil
have neither value nor cash flow, and if they are dependent on fracking
technology also have a relatively short lifespan, of around 18-24
months. Empty hotels produce a heavy cash flow drain, so will cause bond
defaults pretty quickly. As bonds default, the value of other bonds
goes down and bond mutual funds become more difficult to sell – we saw
this dynamic play out with subprime mortgages in 2007. Consequently a
junk bond market meltdown, in which the market seizes up altogether and
credit becomes unavailable, is very likely at some point before the
middle of 2017.

This is not however what Carney was talking about. The junk bond
meltdown and massive financial panic that is shortly about to occur has
not been deliberately caused by the world’s central banks; they are
foolishly under the impression they have done all they can to avert it.
On the other hand, Carney at least hopes that by dire warnings of
“stranded assets” he can prevent energy companies from investing in
fossil fuel projects, thus producing the carbon-free future the naïve
little man imagines we ought to want. Like all government bureaucrats
since the glory days of Gosplan, he hopes to prevent investment in areas
he does not favor by warning potential investors of the costs of
acquiring assets that cannot be utilized because of government
regulation.

Energy companies considering new projects must therefore consider the
probable future course of the world’s political/economic system, as well
as the likely future trend in energy prices. If they believe today’s
low prices are the new normal, then they probably won’t invest much in
unconventional energy, developing only assets in which they have a lot
of confidence, perhaps deep-sea assets in politically stable regions for
which they have paid a great deal of money (probably too much, at
current energy prices) for the leases. At low prices it is thus very
unlikely that the oil companies will have much in the way of stranded
assets; they will invest only modestly, so consumption will keep up with
production, Even if an effective control or “carbon pricing” mechanism
is introduced, the low-risk investments they are currently making are
likely to pay their way so long as the oil deposits last.

The problem becomes more difficult if oil prices rise again (almost
inevitable given the majors’ current reluctance to invest and Small
Oil’s massive flirtation with bankruptcy.) In that event, investment
projects will be more potentially profitable, but also located in more
difficult areas and taking more time to come to fruition. These are the
projects that can become stranded; if the regulators force down the use
of oil by higher taxes or simple bullwhips, high-cost projects with
heavy capital investment and long lives will become unviable, as it will
become impossible to exploit them fully.

If prices rise, energy companies will have to engage in a two-pronged
calculation: will prices stay high enough for the new investments to be
profitable, and will the fad of global warming regulation last long
enough for regulations against fossil fuel use to become effective.

The answers will differ depending on the project. For coal projects, the
popular hatred for coal may just be sufficient to keep heavy
regulations in force, whether or not the global warming problem is
fashionable. Coal is in this sense like nuclear power; it can make a
great deal of sense as an energy source but the political risk of
hysterical reactions by a population driven mad by the media and by
opportunistic politicians makes investment in it always a high-risk
prospect. The only coal projects that are truly politically viable are
those in countries like India and China, where the growth in energy
demand is rapid and Western do-gooder politicians and regulators are
even more unpopular than coal companies.

For oil and gas, on the other hand, the chances of Carney’s “stranding”
appear pretty slim. If the world was not able to come up with binding
climate change targets with the most environmentally committed President
the U.S. has ever had or is ever likely to have, then it will be
politically impossible to get the populace out of their petrol-driven
cars, even if the ineffable Elon Musk brings down the cost of his
alternative to say $40,000 before any subsidies. Budgetary constraints,
which will increase exponentially after the next recession, will prevent
the government from granting large enough electric car subsidies to
overcome popular reluctance to spend that kind of money.

Accordingly, oil companies will continue to claim their product is
essential (as indeed, it will be) and therefore politicians won’t be
able to shut it down. Indeed, it seems likely that the Paris conference
marked the point of “peak climate change” after which it becomes
increasingly difficult to gain popular support for the increasingly
Draconian regulations the Carneys of this world consider necessary.
Energy companies (outside the coal sector) will be able to invest in
full confidence that their assets can only be “stranded” by
technological change, or by to the assets purchased being overpriced,
either directly or in terms of the output they produce. The decision, in
other words, will become once again a business one, of the type these
highly analytical MBAs at the top are paid exorbitantly to take.

Mark Carney should concentrate on raising sterling interest rates, as
far and quickly as possible; that is where his duty lies. Collapsing the
British housing market is not a “bug” in this recommendation, it is a
feature. The sooner real interest rates are again positive, and the
detritus of regulation imposed in the last decade is swept away, the
quicker will the global economy return to the rapid pace of growth which
the world’s inhabitants demand. With rapid global growth and positive
real interest rates, very few assets will be “stranded” either by Mr.
Carney or by the market.

Days when wind farms run at 10% capacity: Union say figures show
renewable energy cannot be relied upon and Britain needs nuclear and
gas-powered energy plants

Wind turbines produced just 10 per cent of their energy capacity during
almost a fortnight of the last three months, it was claimed yesterday.

Monitors tracking the energy generated from Britain's wind farms found
12 days when output dropped to 10 per cent of capacity or less,
according to the GMB union.

It said its 'wind watch' figures demonstrated that Britain could not
rely on renewable energy and needed nuclear or gas-powered plants to
ensure its supply.

Britain has invested £1.25billion in wind power, which is now the country's biggest renewable energy source.

But critics have accused the Government and the National Grid of
complacency over the risk of blackouts following the closure of
coal-fired power stations.

A wind shortage last month (November) forced the National Grid to use
new 'last resort' measures to keep the lights on in homes across the
country on November 4.

Major industries were asked to down tools to protect energy supplies
following high demand, power plant breakdowns and low wind power output.

At one point, wind farms were meeting only 0.5 per cent of the nation's electricity demand, compared to the average 10 per cent.

But in late November, dozens of wind turbines had to be switched off due to safety concerns when Storm Barney hit Britain.

Gusts of up to 85mph swept across the country, prompting fears they could overload the system or damage turbines.

The GMB, which supports more gas-fired power plants, said wind power
produced 10 per cent or less of its energy capacity on 12 days during
the three months from October 1 to December 21.

The figures related to wind farms connected to the national transmission system and not to turbines connected to local networks.

GMB General Secretary Paul Kenny said: 'The renewables lobby has to face
up to the need for a base load electricity capacity that is reliable
and clean on the days that the wind does not blow and the sun doesn't
shine.

'When your electricity supply has 'Gone with the Wind', the response of
the renewable energy suppliers that 'Frankly my dear we don't give a
damn' is just not acceptable.'

Industry body RenewableUK has insisted that wind power is a 'success
story' for Britain, and generated 9.5 per cent of the UK's electricity
from July to September, the last period for which figures were
available.

Overall, 23.5 per cent of the UK's electricity for the same period was
generated by renewable sources, including bioenergy, solar and hydro
power.

RenewableUK and the Department of Energy and Climate Change did not respond to requests for comment on the GMB figures.

A National Grid spokeswoman said: 'A diverse mix of generation is
essential to the national transmission network in terms of security of
supply.'

On climate change, curb your enthusiasm. It’s not that the recent
international conference in Paris didn’t take significant steps to check
global warming. It did. Nearly 200?countries committed to reduce their
greenhouse gas emissions. The goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees
Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) from preindustrial times was
reaffirmed. The trouble is that what’s being attempted is so
fundamentally difficult that even these measures may be wildly unequal
to the task.

What’s being attempted, of course, is the wholesale replacement of the
world economy’s reliance on fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) for
four-fifths of its energy. To be sure, the shift is envisioned to take
decades, four or five at a minimum. Still, the vast undertaking may
exceed human capability.

Hence, a conundrum. Without energy, the world economy shuts down,
threatening economic and social chaos. But the consequences of climate
change, assuming the scientific consensus is accurate, are also grim —
from rising sea levels (threatening coastal cities) to harsher droughts
(reducing food supplies).

It’s useful to split the discussion into two parts. On the existence of
human-driven warming, I accept the dominant scientific view, mainly
because I’m not technically qualified to dispute it. But I have doubted
that, without major breakthroughs in energy technology, we can do much
about warming. The addiction to fossil fuels will triumph.

Paris confirms that view. Rather than show how much progress we’ve made,
it demonstrates how little maneuvering room we have. Consider some
estimates from IHS, a consulting company. In 2012, it reports, the world
generated 45?gigatons of greenhouse gases, up 50?percent since 1990.
Without new policies, that total would rise to 60 gigatons by 2030, IHS
projects. But the national pledges made in Paris would hold the 2030
total to 50 gigatons. That’s good news, right? Well, not exactly.

Limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius would require that
emissions in 2030 drop to 35 gigatons, reckons IHS. So even with the
Paris pledges, we’re about 40 percent above the goal. Moreover, IHS
thinks that some pledged cuts won’t materialize. They are political
gestures or depend on unproven technologies. There are no enforcement
mechanisms.

True, renewable energy is expanding rapidly in the United States. In the
next two years, the solar industry expects to double its installed U.S.
capacity. In 2014, wind generation was up 51 percent from 2011,
according to government figures. Moreover, costs are said to have fallen
sharply. The wind industry puts its decline at 60 percent over the past
four years; the solar industry reports a 70?percent drop since 2009.

But these achievements need to be qualified. For starters, renewables’
rapid growth comes off a tiny base. As a result, wind supplied only 4.4
percent of U.S. electricity in 2014. Solar’s contribution was smaller,
about 1 percent; for 2020, the industry’s target is 3.5 percent. Global
figures are lower. The Economist magazine puts renewables’ share of
world energy production at 1 percent . The fact that wind and solar are
heavily subsidized in the United States, through tax breaks, suggests
that recent cost reductions haven’t yet made renewables competitive with
other energy sources.

Another handicap is physics: Wind and solar generate electricity only
when the sun shines or the wind blows. They need backup power supplies.
This hasn’t been (so far) a big problem in the United States, because we
have many “base” power plants — typically fueled by coal and natural
gas — that can provide backup. Developing countries are another story.
Seeking to reduce their poverty, they need more bulk power, says Robert
Bryce, an energy expert at the Manhattan Institute. They have favored
coal.

Despite Paris, we haven’t acknowledged the difficulties of grappling
with climate change, whose extent and timing are uncertain. We invent
soothing fantasies to simplify matters. The notion that the world can
wean itself from fossil fuels by substituting renewables is one of
these. The potential isn’t large enough.

Actual choices are harder. For example, Bryce argues that only an
expansion of nuclear power could replace significant volumes of fossil
fuels. But greater reliance on nuclear poses its own dangers, including
the disposal of atomic waste, operational accidents and vulnerability to
terrorism.

It’s true that technological breakthroughs could change this. We know
what’s needed: cheaper and safer nuclear power; better batteries and
energy storage, boosting wind and solar by making more of their power
usable; cost-effective carbon capture and storage — making coal more
acceptable by burying its carbon dioxide in the ground.

We have been searching for solutions for decades with only modest
success. We need to keep searching, but without meaningful advances,
regulating the world’s temperature is mission impossible.

'This happens because the unusual warming of the Pacific Ocean leads to a
shift in the typical location of deep convection (intense rainstorms),
which in turn impacts high-level winds, causing greater wind shear which
leads to unfavourable conditions for storms to develop.

'We also found that under the right conditions, in particular strong
warming of the central Pacific, El Niño can suppress hurricane activity
by as much as 50 per cent compared to normal conditions.'

Patricola and colleagues also found that the reverse can happen in other locations creating a 'see-saw' weather scenario.

She said a strong El Niño can produce more frequent hurricanes in the eastern North Pacific.

'This year is an excellent example of that,' she adds. 'Very strong El
Niño conditions in 2015 contributed to the second most active hurricane
season ever recorded in the eastern Pacific Ocean.

'So while an El Niño can help reduce hurricane impacts in the Atlantic
basin, impacts can be much worse over the eastern North Pacific basin.'

Patricola says the findings, published in Nature Geoscience, could help improve seasonal and climate change forecasts.

'Our study gives us a more general understanding of how El Niño and its
variations in location and intensity, influence hurricane seasons in
both the Atlantic and eastern Pacific,' she points out.

'In essence, we found that strong El Niño events that occur over the
warmer locations of the Pacific drive the greatest changes in Western
Hemisphere hurricane seasons.

Thirty major hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones occurred in the northern
hemisphere in 2015; the previous record was 23 (set in 2004).

Twenty-five of those storms reached category 4 or 5, well beyond the previous record of 18.

In the Atlantic, tropical storm Ana formed in early May off the
southeastern coast of the United States, well before the June 1 start of
hurricane season.

But the months that followed were relatively quiet, with 11 named
storms, four hurricanes—the second year in a row below the 1981-2010
median—and no major storms making landfall.

Yet one storm, Fred, became the easternmost hurricane on record in the Atlantic, lashing the Cabo Verde islands in September.

In November, Hurricane Kate hit The Bahamas, becoming one of the latest storms ever recorded in the islands.

The waters of the eastern Pacific warmed significantly in 2015 with the arrival of a potent El Niño.

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA), the region was stirred by 18 named storms and 13 hurricanes,
nine of them major—the most since reliable records were started in 1971.

Fueled by warm air and sea temperatures, Patricia grew rapidly into the
strongest hurricane ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere, with wind
gusts approaching 200 miles (320 km) per hour and air pressure at 879
millibars.

But as research meteorologist Phil Klotzbach of Colorado State
University noted, one of the biggest stories was the amount of activity
in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

In the region above the equator from 140 to 180 degrees western
latitude—the North Central Pacific—14 named storms and eight hurricanes
formed or moved into the region.

Five of this year's storms reached category 3 or above (major), eclipsing the previous record of three.

At one point in August, three major hurricanes spun through the region
east of the International Date Line at the same time, the first time any
meteorologist has seen such activity.

'The 2015 season broke pretty much every prior record for that portion of the Northeast Pacific basin,' Klotzbach said.

'That portion of the basin had record-warm sea surface temperatures and
record-low vertical wind shear, a prime combination for hurricane
intensification and maintenance.'

'El Niño produces a see-saw effect, suppressing the Atlantic season
while strengthening the eastern and central Pacific hurricane seasons,'
noted Gerry Bell, the lead seasonal hurricane forecaster at NOAA's
Climate Prediction Center, in a press release.

'El Niño intensified into a strong event during the summer and
significantly impacted all three hurricane seasons during their peak
months.'

Vertical wind shear was particularly strong in the Atlantic, cutting down storm systems before they could organize.

In the Central Pacific, the wind shear was the weakest on record,
leaving nothing to stop the evolution of hurricanes and typhoons.

In the western Pacific, near Asia and the islands of Oceania, the season
was noteworthy not for the total number of storms, but for the number
of intense ones.

Fifteen typhoons grew to category 3 strength or higher in 2015, tying
records set in 1958 and 1965. El Niño plays a different role in the
western Pacific because slight decreases in water temperatures and wind
fields push storm formation farther to the east, Klotzbach explained.

This allows the storms more time to intensify as they move from east to west with prevailing winds.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

29 December, 2015

China is officially Warmist

Mainly because they are desperate to get their appalling particulate
air pollution down. So they are trying all alternatives to coal --
with nukes the big alternative

Chinese scientists have published two alarming reports in a matter of
weeks. Both conclude that the Himalayan glaciers and the Tibetan
permafrost are succumbing to catastrophic climate change, threatening
the water systems of the Yellow River, the Yangtze and the Mekong.

The Tibetan plateau is the world’s "third pole", the biggest reservoir
of fresh water outside the Arctic and Antarctica. The area is warming at
twice the global pace, making it the epicentre of global climate risk.

One report was by the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The other was a
900-page door-stopper from the science ministry, called the “Third
National Assessment Report on Climate Change”.

The latter is the official line of the Communist Party. It states that
China has already warmed by 0.9-1.5 degrees over the past century –
higher than the global average - and may warm by a further five degrees
by 2100, with effects that would overwhelm the coastal cities of
Shanghai, Tianjin and Guangzhou. The message is that China faces a
civilizational threat.

Whether or not you accept the hypothesis of man-made global warming is
irrelevant. The Chinese Academy and the Politburo do accept it. So does
President Xi Jinping, who spent his Cultural Revolution carting coal in
the mining region of Shaanxi. This political fact is tectonic for the
global fossil industry and the economics of energy.

Until last Saturday, it was an article of faith among Western climate
sceptics and some in the fossil industry that China would never sign up
to the COP21 accord in Paris or accept the "ratchet" of five-year
reviews.

They have since fallen back to a second argument, claiming that the deal
is meaningless because China will not sacrifice coal-driven growth to
please the West, and without China the accord unravels since it now
emits as much CO2 as the US and Europe combined.

This political judgment was perhaps plausible three or four years ago in
the dying days of the Hu Jintao era. Today it is clutching at straws.

Eight of the world’s biggest solar companies are Chinese. So is the
second biggest wind power group, GoldWind. China invested $90bn in
renewable energy last year and is already the superpower of low-carbon
industries. It installed more solar in the first quarter than currently
exists in France.

The Chinese plan to build six to eight nuclear plants every year,
reaching 110 by 2030. They intend to lever this into worldwide nuclear
dominance, as we glimpsed from the Hinkley Point saga.

Home-grown energy is central to Xi Jinping's drive for strategic
security. China's leaders know what happened to Japan under Roosevelt's
energy embargo in the late 1930s, and they don't trust the sea lanes for
supplies of coal and liquefied natural gas. Nor do they relish reliance
on Russian gas.

Isabel Hilton from China Dialogue says the energy shift has reached a
point where Beijing has a vested commercial interest in holding the
world to the Paris deal. “The Chinese think they can dominate low-carbon
technologies,” she said.

This is why they feel confident enough to forge ahead with a
cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions in 2017, covering more CO2
than all of the world's 40 existing schemes put together.

China is changing fast. The energy intensity of Chinese GDP is in
freefall as Xi Jinping tries to wean the economy off primitive
metal-bashing and move up the technology ladder.

The "tertiary sector" has jumped from 42pc to 51pc of the economy since
2007, taking the baton as the Party starts to tackle vast swathes of
excess capacity in steel, cement and shipbuilding.

It comes at a time when the cost curve for renewables has fallen far
enough to make the post-carbon switch economically painless. "The
average cost of global solar was $400 a megawatt/hour worldwide in 2010.
It fell to $130 in 2014, and now it has fallen below $60 in the best
locations. Almost nobody could have imagined this six years ago," said
Mark Lewis from Barclays.

China installed a record 23 gigawatts (GW) of windpower in 2014. It did
so because wind is quick and cheap. Lazard calculates that the
"levelized cost" of unsubsidized onshore wind has dropped 61pc globally,
thanks to smart software, better blades and higher turbines that catch
the sweet spot. It thinks wind now undercuts coal and gas, and by a wide
margin in optimal spots.

Specifically, the levelized cost has fallen "well below" coal in Jilin,
Jiangsu and Zhejiang with new turbines, according to a study by the
North China Electric Power University.

The report below is a little less frank than one in "New Scientist"
on the same topic recently. It did not for instance say how many
degrees of global warming were assumed in the MIT study. So I will
say again what I said a couple of months ago about the MIT study:

This
is a typical bit of brainlessness from the Warmists. They assume a
very high global temperature rise (4 degrees) and calculate from that a
wet-bulb temperature in the Gulf states of 35 degrees, which they say
would make life impossible in the Gulf. They then inform us that
Gulf temperatures already run as high as 34.6. But these things
all operate on a continuum so if 35 is fatal, 34.6 should be extremely
stressful too and more vulnerable people should start dying off at that
point. Yet there is no claim of that. Half the Hajjis were
not wiped out this year.

Clearly the 35 figure is just a
theoretical one divorced from reality. And I know from my own
early life in the tropics that heat-adaptation does occur in
humans. The wet-bulb temperatures I experienced in Cairns would
have been close to those recorded in the Gulf but we all just went about
our business pretty much as usual. We just took it a bit easy and
drank a lot of beer. A cold beer on a hot day is one of life's great
pleasures. But our heat adaptation betrays us when we move away
from the tropics. A temperature that a Scot would experience as a
pleasant summer's day becomes to us quite chilly

If greenhouse gas emissions are not reduced, rising temperatures and
humidity wrought by global warming could expose hundreds of millions of
people worldwide to potentially lethal heat stress by 2060, a new report
suggests.

The greatest exposure will occur in populous, tropical regions such as
India, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. But even in the
northeastern United States, as many as 30 million people might be
exposed at least once a year to heat that could be lethal to children,
the elderly, and the sick, according to the new study.

It’s the first study to look at future heat stress on a global basis,
says Ethan Coffel, a PhD candidate in atmospheric sciences at Columbia
University, who presented the results on Monday at the American
Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco. Coffel and his colleagues
used climate models and population projections to estimate how many
people could face dangerous heat in 2060—assuming that greenhouse gas
emissions continue to rise sharply on a “business-as-usual” course.

The findings are based on forecasts of “wet bulb” temperatures, in which
a wet cloth is wrapped around a thermometer bulb. Whereas standard
thermometer readings measure air temperature, a wet bulb measures the
temperature of a moist surface that has been cooled as much as possible
by evaporation.

That reading depends on both the heat and the humidity of the
surrounding air. It’s generally much lower than the dry-bulb
temperature, and it’s a better indicator of the humid heat that humans
and other large mammals find hardest to deal with.

The normal temperature inside the human body is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit,
or 37 degrees Celsius. Human skin is typically at 35°C. When the
wet-bulb temperature of the air exceeds that level, it becomes
physically impossible for the body to shed its own metabolic heat and
cool itself, especially by evaporating sweat. Even a fit individual
would be expected to die from such heat within six hours.

Today, even in Earth’s hottest, muggiest spots, the wet-bulb temperature
does not rise above 31°C. (The highest dry-bulb temperature ever
recorded is 56.7°C, or 134°F.)

But a study published in October by MIT researchers found that by 2100,
in Persian Gulf cities such as Abu Dhabi or Dubai, the 35°C threshold of
human survival may occasionally be exceeded—again, assuming that
greenhouse emissions continue to rise unabated.
Where Heat, Humidity, and People Intersect

In practice, wet-bulb temperatures below the 35°C threshold are
dangerous for children, the elderly, people with heart or lung
problems—or anybody actively working outside. By the 2060s, according to
Coffel and his colleagues, 250 million people could be experiencing
33°C at least once a year. As many as 700 million could be exposed to
32°C. For many people, those conditions could be lethal.

“You have a large portion of the world that’s very densely populated and
potentially at risk,” says Coffel. “Populations which right now work
primarily outdoors and have very little access to air conditioning. It’s
hard to function outdoors in those kinds of temperatures.”

The MIT study concluded that wet-bulb temperatures of 32°C or 33°C could
be expected to arise later this century in Mecca, for example, where
they might sometimes coincide with the Hajj, when millions of pilgrims
pray outdoors all day long.

But as rising temperatures push more moisture into the atmosphere,
particularly near warming oceans, spells of extreme heat and humidity
will become more frequent and intense in many parts of the world. Even
residents of cities like New York and London could encounter future
temperatures that are near the limits of what their bodies can tolerate,
according to the Columbia researchers.

“Local ocean temperatures can be a really big driver for the extent of
these high heat and humidity events,” says co-author Radley Horton of
Columbia. “How far inland away from the coasts will we see some of these
really deadly high heat and humidity events penetrate? Will this impact
where people are able to live?”

Bryan Jones, a postdoctoral fellow at the City University of New York
who also studies future heat exposures but was not part of the Columbia
study, said its “projections of exposure to extreme heat stress seem
very reasonable. In fact, they may even be conservative, depending on
how populations in West Africa, India, and Southeast Asia are
distributed in the coming decades.”
Heat Is Already A Big Killer

Heat already kills more people than any other form of extreme weather.
In the past decade, heat waves that featured wet-bulb temperatures
between 29°C and 31°C have caused tens of thousands of deaths in Europe,
Russia, and the Middle East.

Last summer more than 2,300 died from extreme heat in India, where air
temperatures reached 122°F. High humidity and temperatures topping 116°F
also proved deadly in Egypt this year. And work stopped for several
summer days in Iraq while thermometers hovered around 120°F.

Air conditioning protects those who have access to it and can afford it.
The spread of high-heat-stress events is likely to produce a surge in
demand, says Horton. Air conditioners don’t function as efficiently in
humid conditions, however—and as long as the electricity for them is
generated with fossil fuels, they add to the underlying problem.

The other approach to coping with dangerous heat, Coffel says, is
“reorganizing your society, like when you work outside, like giving
people the day off when it’s hot.”

Neither air-conditioning nor staying inside is an option for other large
mammals, which are affected by climbing heat and humidity in much the
same way as humans. The impact on them is a “wild card,” says Horton.
Little research has been done.

If the Pope wants his teaching on global warming to be regarded as
authoritative, he should declare it to be infallible. That would
put the cat among the pigeons. He could do so but he has not

A heated exchange regarding global warming and magisterial teaching
between a top Vatican official and various other presenters ended a
December 3 Acton Institute conference in Rome. Argentinean Bishop
Marcelo Sánchez Sorondo, a close advisor to Pope Francis and the
Chancellor of both the Pontifical Academy of Sciences and the Pontifical
Academy of Social Sciences stressed that the pope’s declarations on the
gravity of global warming as expressed in the encyclical Laudato Si’
are magisterial teaching equivalent to the teaching that abortion is
sinful.

Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, the founder of Ignatius Press who obtained his
doctorate in theology under Joseph Ratzinger prior to his elevation to
the pontificate, told LifeSiteNews, “Neither the pope nor Bishop Sorondo
can speak on a matter of science with any binding authority, so to use
the word ‘magisterium’ in both cases is equivocal at best, and ignorant
in any case.” Fr. Fessio added, “To equate a papal position on abortion
with a position on global warming is worse than wrong; it is an
embarrassment for the Church.”

The conference, "In Dialogue with Laudato Si': Can Free Markets Help Us
Care for Our Common Home?" was held at the Pontifical University of the
Holy Cross with over 200 attendees including members of the media,
professors, and students of the Pontifical Universities.

The controversy was sparked when in his address Bishop Sorondo spoke of
“global warming” saying that in Laudato Si “for the first time in the
Magisterium” Pope Francis “denounces the scientifically identifiable
causes of this evil, declaring that: ‘a number of scientific studies
indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great
concentration of greenhouse gases released mainly as a result of human
activity.’” He repeated the point later, saying, “faith and reason,
philosophical knowledge and scientific knowledge, are brought together
for the first time in the pontifical Magisterium in Laudato Si'."

These points were contradicted in the presentation by Acton Institute
founder and President Father Robert Sirico who said it is “important to
underscore the distinction between the theological dimension of Laudato
si’ and its empirical, scientific, and economic claims.” He explained,
“The Church does not claim to speak with the same authority on matters
of economics and science… as it does when pronouncing on matters of
faith and morals.”

Quoting the Compendium of Catholic Social Doctrine to support his point,
Fr. Sirico said: “Christ did not bequeath to the Church a mission in
the political, economic or social order; the purpose he assigned to her
was a religious one. . . . This means that the Church does not
intervene in technical questions with her social doctrine, nor does she
propose or establish systems or models of social organization. This is
not part of the mission entrusted to her by Christ” (CCSD 68).

Father Joseph Fessio: “To equate a papal position on abortion with a
position on global warming is worse than wrong; it is an embarrassment
for the Church.”

When asked in a question and answer period that concluded the conference
about the weight of the pope’s opinions regarding global warming in
Laudato Si’, Bishop Sorondo distinguished between infallible statements
and statements of the pope’s “Ordinary Magisterium.” The
distinction is important because ex-cathedra statements are in Catholic
teaching “infallible” or never in error and require absolute adherence
by all Catholics, while some of those in the “Ordinary Magisterium”
could be in error but nonetheless teachings to which Catholics should
submit “in mind and will.”

However, even asserting Pope Francis’ reflections on global warming in
Laudato Si’ are part of his Ordinary Magisterium would propose a grave
challenge to all those scientists who have asserted global warming is a
hoax.

Comparing the Pope’s teaching on global warming to the Church’s teaching
on abortion, Bishop Sorondo said the “judgement must be considered
Magisterium – it is not an opinion.”

“It is under Ordinary Magisterium,” he explained, “that abortion is a
grievous sin – this is Ordinary Magisterium because there is not the
revelation of it.” So there is an assumption of “moral doctrine,” he
continued, that even though the majority opinion is contrary, we accept
that “abortion is a grievous sin” is Magisterium.

This led to a heated exchange with panel presenters at the conference,
especially journalist Riccardo Cascioli, who objected to the suggestion
that Catholics must submit to pronouncements on “scientific theories”
rather than “faith and morals.”

Sorondo retorted by saying, “When the Pope has assumed this, it is
Magisterium of the Church whether you like it or not -- it is the
Magisterium of the Church just as abortion is a grievous sin – equal (it
is the same)… it is Magisterium of the Church... whether you like
it or not.”

Pope Francis in Laudato Si’, says, “The Church does not presume to
settle scientific questions or to replace politics,” and that he seeks
to “encourage an honest and open debate” (para 188). Nevertheless Bishop
Sorondo seemed to oppose the contestability of global warming theories.

When Cascioli suggested Catholics could follow their consciences on the
theoretical scientific matters, Sorondo rejoined, “If you were a
scientist and had a serious (difference of) opinion,” then you could
follow your conscience, “but since you are a journalist it is better you
follow the opinion of the Pope!” Cascioli reminded the bishop that he
too was not a scientist, to which Sorondo replied, “But I am in the
Academy of Science of the Pope.”

When Fr. Sirico suggested that there are other experts or scientists
with different opinions on the matter of global warming, Sorondo fired
back, “But don’t follow them, follow these. Just like in
philosophy, there are many philosophers.. But the Magisterium of the
Church follows the philosophy of the being, the person. There are many
who say the person does not exist – the Pope does not follow them.... I
say it is Magisterium.”

Fr. Fessio was unabashed in his criticism. “Bishop Sorondo is unknown to
me, and – judging by this statement – eminently worthy of that
ignorance,” he commented. “The best I can say of his remarks is that
they seem to have been unprepared.”

Like ancient Druids pleading with the gods for good seasons, world
leaders and their aides recently devoted a fortnight in Paris to
pleading with each other to stop global temperatures from rising more
than an average 2C above pre-industrial levels, when the Earth was
emerging from the Little Ice Age.

Of the 196 nations represented at the COP21 conference, 154 were
developing economies. Regardless of the direction of world temperatures,
they left Paris happy that the UN’s Green Climate Fund, which aims to
reach $US100 billion a year by 2020, will give them cash for anything
they can pass off as remotely ­related to their intended national
contributions to world CO2 ­reduction. They argue this is only fair.
Poor countries fare worst from climate change and must be compensated
for unspecified damage and their share of repairing the West’s legacy.
You can bet $US100bn a year won’t do it.

Overwhelmingly, the money for the fund will come from 42 guilt-racked
wealthy nations. That is their moral responsibility. They caused the
warming. They threaten the planet. It’s time for them to repay their
climate debts.

It matters not that there is no empirical scientific evidence to support
these claims. Even the 2C target is not based on science, it was
originally plucked out of thin air by the European People’s Party for
election purposes. But then climate change is not about credible
scientific evidence. It has its roots in Marxism, and ultimately the
Green Fund is presided over by the UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change, run by Costa Rican Marxist Christiana Figueres. The
“paradigm-shifting” fund will provide employment for an army of green
bureaucrats who will offer “concessional finance” for the development
needs of less advanced countries.

China, the leading emitter, venting one billion tonnes of CO2 a year
more than it admits to, has been adroit in dealing with the politics. It
approaches its domestic air quality crisis under the banner of climate
action and so turns a domestic necessity into a global virtue. From this
and its lack of interest in aid for itself, China projects moral
authority and, while there is no cap on its emissions and only a promise
that they will peak by 2030, promotes emission restraints for others,
for its own competitive advantage.

India has adopted a similar line. The world’s third largest emitter is
set to overtake China. It will not accept constraints on ­development
and does not spell out when emissions will peak. Like China, it will
adopt cleaner energy to improve air quality and will claim UN
compensation.

Having successfully captured the West, post-Paris, the noose will
tighten. Despite assurances that intended nationally determined
contributions, delivered before the conference, would keep temperature
increases to no more than 2C, we are now told that even if fully
implemented, temperatures will rise by 2.7C by 2100. So the Paris
agreement will “only lay the groundwork” and all those hard-won pledges
were based on a miscalculation.

How disappointing. But there is now an aspirational 1.5C ambition on the
table that Figueres quickly endorsed. Should it ever be agreed to,
expect more ambit claims. And without a Tony ­Abbott in Canberra or a
Stephen Harper in Ottawa, no world leader utters a peep in protest.

Caught in a moral dilemma of its own making, the developed world
concedes its culpability. Its representatives succumb to propaganda and
bullying and credulously accept bogus science and catastrophism. They
pay no heed to alternative views. They consider abandoning fossil fuels,
the world’s cheapest, most ­efficient and wealth-creating power source,
and baulk at ­nuclear alternatives.

Instead, they pour hundreds of billions of dollars into costly,
­­in-efficient renewable energy, robbing their industries of flexibility
and competitiveness and, punishing the world’s poorest citizens.

Indeed, Western capitalist societies have given up on rational thinking.
They embrace junk ­science and junk economics and adopt
wealth-destroying postmodern pseudo-economics, which teaches that
taxpayer subsidies can produce desirable “economic transformation” and
faster growth. Pigs may also fly.

Climate change has cowed once great powers into meekly surrendering
sovereignty and independent thought to unelected bureaucrats in Geneva.
From the White House to the Lodge, private choice now runs a distant
second to collectivist visions.

Although only an aspiration now, the 1.5C target will be relentlessly
pursued until adopted. The media, in step with the Green ­Machine, will
bombard us with climate alarmism to the applause of the leader of the
free world, Barack Obama, who says: “My mission is to make the world
aware that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism.” ­Really?
That’s serious. Clearly authority, not common sense or science, now
rules the world.

While some activists such as James Hansen may criticise the Paris
agreement as “worthless words”, those such as Figueres, interested in
reconfiguring the world’s political and economic structure, will be
pleased with progress. We are another step closer to her ideal of
‘‘centralised transformation”, with the UN at the authoritarian centre,
calling the shots and doling out transfer payments from the rich to
ensure poor countries remain her ­mendicants. As UN Secretary-General
Ban Ki-moon says: “If we really want to put an end to global poverty, if
we really want to make the world healthier and planet Earth
environmentally sustainable, we have first to address the climate change
issue.”

The only certainty to come out of COP21 is that there will be a COP22.

It’s not every year that New Yorkers get to experience Christmas in a
t-shirt. This year, New Yorkers, as well as others on the United States
east coast got to experience some of the warmest Christmas temperatures
on record.

Are these record breaking Christmas temperatures proof of global warming
or simply a fluke of nature? According to CNN, some meteorologists have
referred to these unusually warm December temperature patterns as the
“blowtorch.”

National Geographic attributes the warmer than usual Christmas
temperatures to El Nino and climate change. El Niño, which is the
periodic warming of the Pacific Ocean, tends to bring with it more
moisture and warmer than usual air temperatures. Some experts state that
the same El Niño air patterns that are bringing warm weather to the
east coast are also responsible for the heavy snow in areas like Denver.

As of last week, December alone already brought over 2,600 record high
temperatures along the east coast, and even more are expected before
ringing in the New Year. Accuweather reported that some locations across
the southeast and up to New England have broken their previous record
temperatures by 10 degrees or more.

“One of the most impressive records on Christmas Eve occurred in
Burlington, Vermont, when the city set their all-time December high
temperature. New York City and Baltimore are some of the cities that
could break records yet again on Sunday before a cold front washes away
the warmth,” said Brian Lada, an AccuWeather Meteorologist.

On Christmas Day, five locations around New York shattered previous
Christmas day temperature records. It’s reported that some people were
even playing volleyball in Central Park; something that is completely
unheard of for winter in New York.

According the New York Times, the unusually warm Christmas weather
interfered with typical Christmas traditions, as New Yorkers traded
snowmen and ice skating for ice cream and summer sports.

The only location across the northeast that reported a white Christmas
was northern Maine with about an inch of snow. Yet, some are still
skeptical to attribute the heat wave to global warming and climate
change.

The blog Real Science stated their opposition to the global warming
argument by saying, “Christmas Eve 1955 was much warmer. Three-fourths
of the country was over 60 degrees, and Ashland Kansas, Geary Oklahoma
and Encinal Texas were all over 90 degrees. Fort Lauderdale was 85
degrees. Last winter, the East Coast had record cold. That was ignored
because it was ‘less than 1% of the Earth.’ But this week, the Eastern
US defines the global climate.”

Meanwhile, alternative news site Common Dreams explained that the
correlation between El Niño, climate change and global warming often
gets muddied, but that global warming is a factor in the record breaking
December temperatures.

Erika Spanger-Siegfried senior analyst in the Climate and Energy program
at the Union of Concerned Scientists said, “2015 is the hottest year on
record by a wide margin, topping 2014. 2014 became the hottest year
even in the absence of El Niño. We’re climbing the stairs, picking up
pace, and taking some two at a time. So. Whatever we want to call
December’s freakishly warm weather, whatever we’re tempted to call the
punishing cold and snow that could follow, we ought not to leave out the
global warming propping it all up.”

The National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of
Commerce filed a lawsuit on Wednesday against the EPA over its revised
ozone rule, calling it “unworkable and overly burdensome.”

In October, the EPA changed the standard for ground-level ozone from 75
parts per billion, which was set in 2008, to 70 parts per billion.

“The EPA’s ozone regulation, which could be one of the most expensive in
history, is unworkable and overly burdensome for manufacturers and
America’s job creators," said Linda Kelly, NAM's senior vice president
and general counsel, in a statement. "Manufacturers across the United
States need regulations that provide balance and allow us to be globally
competitive."

The Chamber of Commerce agreed.

“The EPA has created a web of regulations that makes it almost
impossible for businesses to succeed in this already tough economic
climate,” said William Kovacs, the Chamber’s senior vice president for
environment, technology and regulatory affairs, reports The Hill.

NAM led the charge against the ozone rule while the EPA was considering
updating the standard. The group commissioned a report saying that a
standard of 65 parts per billion — which the EPA had considered — could
cost up to $1.1 trillion to implement.
The EPA and the rule’s supporters have questioned those analyses, and
have said the rule will help improve public health. Green groups and
health organizations, though, have criticized the rule for not going far
enough toward cutting down smog.

NMA and the Chamber of Commerce are just the latest groups suing the EPA
over the revised rule. Murray Energy Corp., a coal company, and five
states—Arkansas, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Arizona—also
filed lawsuits shortly after the rule was announced in the fall.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

28 December, 2015

British Greenies need instructions on how to open a door!

At least their bosses think they do

Civil servants have been given a safety guide that instructs them how to
use doors after a shocking 14 members of staff were hurt walking
through them in five years.

A step-by-step memo was sent to 2,440 people at the Department of Energy and Climate Change, run by energy secretary Amber Rudd.

The vital instructions include 'open the door slowly' and if the door
has a 'vision panel' look through to 'judge if there's someone on the
other side'.

The guide was issued because of the number of accidents staff had experienced in recent years.

However, it has left others raising their eyebrows, with criticism over it being a waste of time and resources.

Jonathan Isaby, of the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: 'This is patronising
rubbish of the highest order and proof that there remains plenty of fat
to trim at Whitehall departments.

'Families facing huge bills because of green taxes this department is
responsible for will be appalled to see their money wasted like this.

'Perhaps it's those responsible for producing this 'advice' who should be shown how to use the door.'

Double standards and pollution continue, while the feds exonerate themselves from blame

Paul Driessen

When a private citizen or company violates rules, misrepresents facts or
pollutes a river, government penalties are swift and severe. It’s
different when the government lies or screws up.

Two weeks ago, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell testified before
Congress on a toxic spill that federal and state agencies unleashed into
western state rivers last August. Supervised by officials from the US
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Colorado Division of
Reclamation, Mining and Safety (DRMS), an Environmental Restoration (ER)
company crew excavated tons of rock and debris that had blocked the
portal (entrance or adit) to the Gold King Mine above Silverton,
Colorado.

The crew kept digging until the remaining blockage burst open, spilling
3,000,000 gallons of acidic water laden with iron, lead, cadmium,
mercury and other heavy metals. The toxic flood contaminated the Animas
and San Juan Rivers, all the way to Lake Powell in Utah. EPA then waited
an entire day before notifying downstream mayors, health officials,
families, kayakers, fishermen, farmers and ranchers that the water they
were drinking, paddling in, or using for crops and livestock was
contaminated.

Ms. Jewell told Congress she was unaware of anyone being fired, fined or
even demoted. In fact, federal investigations and reports didn’t hold
anyone responsible for the disaster. (Maybe they even got bonuses.)
Considering the spill’s severity, the gross incompetence of government
officials, their advance knowledge of the dangers, and the way they
downplayed and whitewashed their actions, this is intolerable.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy did say she was “absolutely, deeply
sorry.” But then FEMA denied disaster relief to the Navajos, and EPA
sent them emergency water tanks contaminated with oil!

As I explained in a detailed analysis, experts had warned that
contaminated water had probably backed up hundreds of feet upward into
the mine, creating the risk of a sudden, powerful toxic flashflood. EPA,
DRMS and ER’s prior experience with nearby mines meant they personally
knew the high risks in advance. In a June 2014 work plan for the planned
cleanup, ER itself had warned: “Conditions may exist that could result
in a blowout of the blockages and cause a release of large volumes of
contaminated mine waters and sediment from inside the mine, which
contain concentrated heavy metals.”

Yet they went ahead, with no emergency plans for dealing with a toxic
spill. They didn’t even follow their own ill-conceived plan. As the
contamination moved downstream, they claimed they had simply
“miscalculated” how much water had backed up and insisted they had been
“very careful.” Barely a week after the spill, Ms. McCarthy said the
river is “restoring itself” to “pre-spill conditions” – something she
would never say if a privately owned company had caused similar
contamination.

On August 24, EPA issued a preliminary report that can only be called a
Tom Sawyer whitewash, designed to absolve the perpetrators of any blame,
liability, civil penalty or criminal prosecution.

It says the state and federal personnel at Gold King were “senior mining
experts” and “experienced professionals” who have “extensive experience
with the investigation and closure of mines.” But their names were all
redacted from the summary, and their actions strongly suggest that they
had little training or experience in reopening mines or dealing with
possible water impoundments and toxic spills.

The EPA/DRMS determination that there was “no or low mine water
pressurization” at Gold King was supposedly based on actual
observations. However, the EPA review team said it “was not able to
identify any calculations made on the possible volume of water that
could be held behind the portal plug.”

In fact, the “professionals” simply claimed ongoing mine drainage showed
that a pressure buildup was not likely. Wrong. It simply showed that
the compacted overburden was able to hold back an enormous volume of
water – until they destroyed its structural integrity. They also said a
similar excavation at a nearby mine “did not result in a blowout.” But
that’s irrelevant. Every mine is unique and must be treated as if a
worst-case scenario could unfold. The other mine didn’t have serious
water backup; Gold King did.

Perhaps the most blatant example of self-serving excuses is on page 7, which says in relevant part:

“Mine water pressurization data from behind the blockage potentially
could have been obtained through a drill hole inserted further back into
the [Gold King] Adit from above the mine tunnel. Such a technique was …
not used at the [Gold King] Adit [because it] would have been very
difficult and expensive … and require much more planning and multiple
field seasons to accomplish. Although difficult and therefore expensive
and technically challenging, this procedure may have been able to
discover the pressurized conditions that turned out to cause the
blowout.” [emphasis added]

In truth, the crew could easily have drilled a borehole lined with steel
pipe from above the portal into an area behind the blockage, and then
used simple instruments to determine the water pressure and extent of
water backup, before beginning to dig. They had done this elsewhere and
at could have done it at Gold King for less than $75,000, experienced
miners told me. It was not “technically challenging.”

These “experienced professionals” guessed but did not test. They simply
assumed there was limited water in the mine, and charged blindly ahead.
And they did it after bullying their way onto the Gold King premises by
threatening its owner with $35,000 per day in fines if he did not allow
them on his property.

Their actions were grossly negligent. In fact, they are criminal
offenses under the Clean Water Act and other laws that the government
routinely uses to fine and jail private citizens and company employees,
such as John Pozsgai, Bill Ellen, and employees of Freedom Industries
and the Pacific & Arctic Railway. None of these “convicted felons”
intended to cause those accidents, and all were “absolutely, deeply
sorry” for what happened. Why should the state and federal culprits be
treated any differently – get off scot free – after causing far worse
environmental damage?

Before the blowout, the Gold King Mine was leaking 206 gallons of
acidic, metals-laden but mostly clear water per minute in 2010, 140 gpm
in 2011, 13 in August 2014 and 112 in September 2014, just before EPA
first began working at the mine portal. On August 5, 2015, it
flash-flooded more than 3,000,000 gallons of turmeric-orange,
toxic-sludge-laden pollution.

The mine is now leaking 500-900 gallons per minute: 720,000 to 1,300,000
gallons per day – a huge increase in pollution into these important
waterways. Until winter set in, most of it was finally being treated
before entering Cement Creek, the Animas River and downstream waters.

So we must ask, what was the emergency that “forced” the EPA and DRMS to
return to Gold King, demand immediate access to the site – and proceed
in such a hasty, negligent manner? Unfortunately, this incident and the
whitewashing that followed is too typical of government agencies that
have become increasingly dictatorial, unaccountable, and dismissive of
other interests, outside expertise, and people’s needs for jobs,
minerals, energy and quality living standards.

Today, throughout the Rocky Mountain region, waters are still polluted
by metals and minerals that are present in underground mines … along
with the gold and silver that have long drawn prospectors, created jobs,
and built state and local economies. Hopefully, effluents from all
these abandoned mines will soon be minimized via practical, efficient,
low-maintenance treatment systems, under legal regimes that do not
assign unlimited liability to private sector entities that try to fix
these problems.

That will greatly improve water quality in many streams – while
suggestions presented in EPA’s otherwise shoddy internal review could do
much to prevent a repeat of Gold King, if they are followed.

Meanwhile, Congress and state legislatures should further investigate
the Gold King disaster, and compel witnesses to testify under oath. They
should also improve relevant laws, ensure that agency personnel are
truly qualified to do their tasks, and hold agency incompetents and
miscreants accountable.

Via email

Two cheers for the Chevy Volt

Electric cars are nice to drive and the Volt should have range
enough for most commutes. A useful second car for affluent
families, perhaps?

MY TRIP FROM L.A. to San Francisco in a 2016 Chevrolet Volt was an
outlier, as Malcolm Gladwell would say. The redesigned Volt is a city
car, with 53 miles of all-electric-vehicle range before it has to fire
up the range-extending 1.5-liter gas engine. That’s enough to cover
Americans’ average daily commute (37 miles) with room to spare. And
within those 53 miles, the Volt thrives as a light, quick presence, an
electric hummingbird, with premium cabin innards and 0-30 mph
acceleration (2.6 seconds) that will dispatch your coffee to the back
seat.

Beyond those 53 miles, in range-extender mode, the hummingbird sounds a
bit more like a wasp trapped in the windscreen. Particularly up the
merciless grade known as the Grapevine on the I-5 toward the Tejon Pass,
the Volt struggled with the physics of the affair, which sussed out to
be 101 horsepower drawing a 3,543-pound car up a mountain (once the
batteries are depleted the engine power is routed directly to the front
wheels). At 80 mph the little engine was working hard and the
noise-abatement measures weren’t.

Then I had a revelation, one that Volt designers must have had many
years ago: You can’t make range-extender mode too pleasant, lest
consumers just forget it’s a plug-in hybrid car and keep filling it with
gas and never plugging in. That would be, in engineering parlance,
stupid. So, I was in “punishment mode” the whole way to San Francisco,
which I thought was pretty funny.

I know the Volt fires up the political bases. Rolled out in the days of
GM’s government-financed restructuring, the tidy plug-in hybrid was
loathed as Obama’s Popemobile, even though the Volt project was
initiated during the Bush administration. And to people who declaim it
as a worthless product of governments’ intervention in markets and
industry, I say, yes, that’s correct, except for the worthless part.

Actually, the Volt is quite worthy and still a bit visionary. You don’t
think plug-in hybrids with range-extenders will ever catch on? Just hold
your breath, 1, 2, 3.

If I may write two terms on the blackboard: urbanization and
low-emissions zones (LEVs). As to the first, 81% of Americans live in
urban areas, and U.S. rural population is ticking down. So any rules
that affect solely urban areas would still affect the vast majority of
Americans. Globally, half the world’s population are city dwellers; the
U.N. predicts by 2050 two out of three persons will live in urban areas.

At the recent Paris climate-change conference, a group representing the
world’s largest cities, the C40, announced aggressive targets to cut
carbon emissions. Dozens of European cities have low-emission or
no-emission zones in place or in progress. Of particular gravity is the
financial and cultural giant London, which was a leader in congestion
taxes. London aims to cut emissions by 60% over 1995 levels in the next
decade. That will require steep cuts in vehicle emissions. Pretty soon
if the world’s elite want to wheel their Ferraris down to Kensington,
they are going to need a plug.

Urban populations in the U.S. are reliably politically blue and can be
counted on to advance a progressive agenda regarding carbon and vehicle
emissions at the ballot box. For example: If auto makers want to sell
their wares in California, the most populous state and largest car
market, they have to play by rules set by Californians themselves,
through the California Air Resources Board, among other agencies.
Because of this , California clean-air rules have had a determinative
effect on most of the automotive world.

Seattle, New York, Portland, San Francisco and Austin are among the U.S.
cities pledging to move toward carbon neutrality. Further out are
weather-makers like the U.S. Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards,
which will require auto makers to achieve 54.5 mpg fleet average by
2025. The EU has its own upward slope of standards.

A common refrain of EV doubters is that lower-cost efficiencies can
still be found in the internal combustion engine. Actually, the 2016
Volt agrees. Replacing the first generation’s port-injected, iron-block
1.4 liter that drank premium unleaded, the new direct-injection,
aluminum-block 1.5 liter is lighter and more powerful (101 hp vs. 84 hp)
and quieter overall, unless you are flogging it across the Imperial
Valley on dinosaur fumes.

The fresher engine, part of GM’s EcoTec family, accounts for the Volt’s
higher combined fuel economy (106 mpg-e) and higher efficiency in
range-extender mode (42 mpg combined). The tweaks to the powertrain
hardware net a weight savings of more than 100 pounds.

It may be only now that the post-Christmas pantomime season opens, but
one pantomime running throughout the year has been that staged by all
those comic characters who try to persuade us that the world is faced
with deadly “global warming” (“Oh no it isn’t,” shouts an ever louder
chorus from the audience).

Much on show, for instance, has been our favourite “pantomime dame”,
Prof Julia Slingo, the Chief Scientist for the Met Office, with her
organisation’s latest bid to alarm us by giving cute little names such
as “Storm Eva” to all these episodes of seasonal wind and rain, which
may be hell for those flooded out, but are technically not “storms” at
all.

It is she who presides over those wacky computer models that have raised
so many laughs over the years, with such predictions as that “barbecue
summer”, which inevitably led to weeks of rain. Last week one media
outlet mischievously reminded us of Dame Julia’s claim in 2013 that the
melting of Arctic ice was now “loading the dice” in favour of “colder,
drier winters”, only for this to be followed by the three wettest winter
months since records began in 1766.

Also much on stage has been “Buttons”, played by Roger Harrabin, the
BBC’s environmental correspondent. Last week, undeterred by his failure
to foresee the entirely predictable fiasco of the Paris climate summit,
he invited Friends of the Earth to explain how “outrageous” it is that
“the government can continue to hand out billions of pounds a year in
subsidies to climate-wrecking fossil fuels”. Buttons somehow forgot to
tell us that even the Department of Energy and Climate Change insists on
the obvious fact that “the UK has no subsidies for fossil fuels”.

Finally bounding on to the stage again, greeted with customary boos, is
our favourite pantomime villain Bob Ward, the chap paid by a billionaire
climate fanatic to hurl derision at anyone daring to question the
warmist faith. He now informs us that, thanks to “Britain’s commitment
to the climate deal”, all use of gas for cooking, heating or making
electricity “will be phased out, probably as soon as possible”.

"Scrapping gas has long been our own government’s policy, as the only way it can meet our insane commitments"

This would come as no surprise to readers of this column, since I have
long been reporting on it, as in my Christmas article last year, headed
“Forget your gas cooker – we’re headed for zero-carbon Britain”.

But the plan that within not many years, those 23 million UK households
that rely on gas will have to scrap their cookers and central heating
has nothing to do with that Paris “deal” (which committed no one to
anything). Scrapping gas has long been our own government’s policy, as
the only way it can meet our insane commitments under the Climate Change
Act.

Another difference between me and Mr Ward is that while I argue that all
this amounts to no less than a national suicide note, he believes it
would be a jolly good thing.

This is the least important of the big stories because it’s not about
something that’s actually happening. It’s about how a whole section of
our top political and cultural leadership is pretending that something
that isn’t happening is actually the most vital and pressing issue of
the day. That is pretty important in its own right.

I’ll call this The Phantom Menace, which you can consider a tribute to
the return of the Star Wars saga, or perhaps an unwelcome reminder of
everybody’s least favorite prequel. (It’s a close call between the
three, but Phantom Menace had the most Jar-Jar Binks, so it wins.)

I am talking, of course, about “climate change,” the lame euphemism for claims about catastrophic human-caused global warming.

The role of global warming in this year’s news is summed up in the
recently concluded Paris Agreement: a gigantic international meeting
held within a month of a massive terrorist attack on that city, for the
purpose of diverting everyone’s attention away from the threat of
terrorism.

As I wrote last week:

"After last month’s massive terrorist attack brought
the disastrous civil war in Syria and the renewed threat of radical
Islam back to the forefront of everyone’s minds, world leaders met in
Paris to forge an ambitious agreement — about global warming.

You didn’t think they were going to do something big and important about terrorism, did you?

No, they’re much more interested in what our own
president clearly regards as the real issue of the day, “climate
change.” And so the global warming conference ended with the Paris
Agreement, which was hailed by both The Guardian and Slate as the “end
of the fossil fuel era.”

I also noted that, for all that triumphalism about ending fossil fuels,
the Paris Agreement is just a massive pretense in which “everything is
legally binding, except the actual heart of the agreement.” But I noted
that it serves a purpose.

"Consider President Obama’s pronouncement that the
agreement is “a testament to American leadership.” “We came together
around a strong agreement the world needed. We met the moment.” For a
president whose administration is known for the absence of American
leadership and who is palpably not “meeting the moment,” you can see the
incentive to pretend that he is by signing some phony-baloney agreement
to solve a phony-baloney problem.

The intellectual basis for this evasion is summed up in the preposterous
claim that global warming caused ISIS. After tracing the actual causes
and origins of the Syrian civil war, I noted:

"All of these facts are readily available to anyone
who follows the news. And then there is the role in these attacks of a
major world religion with about a billion followers that has been around
for 1400 years — a primary cause that is a little hard to miss. Yet
President Obama, [Bill] Nye, and many other water-carriers for the left
offer us glib pronouncements about how this is all about water shortages
in Syria. This is spectacular, willful ignorance dressed up as love for
science."

This is the reason Obama doesn’t have much of a strategy for destroying
ISIS and recently admitted that he was out of touch about how important
the Paris attacks were because he didn’t watch enough cable news shows. I
don’t even know where to start in describing how pathetic that is.

But the Left does have a plan to vilify and censor global warming
skeptics, with New York’s attorney general launching an investigation to
punish Exxon-Mobil for having briefly funded a few climate skeptics.

"To be sure, this case will take forever to go
through the courts…. But this is another case where the prosecution is
the punishment. Just the prospect of being dragged through the courts
and publicly maligned by prosecutors is deterrent enough.

This prosecution is not really aimed at Exxon, which
has pockets deep enough to fight if it chooses…. [T]he real target is
everybody smaller than Exxon. The message is going out that they will
face political reprisals, including embarrassing and expensive
persecution in the courts, if they ever give a dollar to a climate
skeptic….

It seems Schneiderman has learned from the
neo-authoritarians in Russia and China how to impose political control.
There is no need for anything so crude as outright censorship. Anybody
can say what they like, if they’re shouting on a street corner or
writing in the pages of some obscure journal for intellectuals. But
nobody can get any money to broadcast their views more widely because
anyone with money faces ruin if they stand out against the powers that
be."

And President Obama has a plan of attack for destroying our most
plentiful sources of energy, under the guise of a transition to “clean
power.” This “clean power,” as I explained, is based on absurd
assumptions and is scientifically impossible.

"So why create a national electricity scheme that is
impossible to build? Perhaps because its purpose is not to build but to
tear down. If you come up with a plan that claims it will reduce
existing sources of energy in favor of new sources of energy — and those
new sources turn out to be speculative at best, and physically
impossible at worst — then it’s fair to conclude that the real essence
of the plan is simply to reduce existing sources of energy."

So our leaders are dispirited and ineffective when it comes to deciding
on a plan to destroy our actual enemies — but apply endless vigor and
initiative to coming up with plans to dismantle our own civilization.

The delusion that global warming is the only really important issue of
our era, eclipsing everything else, is embraced by elites in all areas
of the culture. It benefits from the kind of universal dissemination
characteristic of a new religion — which is reflected in the inroads it
has made in converting leaders of the old religion.

Thus, for example, Christians are under unprecedented attack in the
Middle East. Syrian Christians who speak the language of Christ,
Aramaic, and whose churches were first established by the apostles
themselves, have survived for 2000 years but are now fleeing the
expansion of ISIS. Yet Pope Francis, who should be one of their most
outspoken champions, has been devoting much more of his time as a
partisan shill for global warming. I pointed out the totally one-sided
presentation of the scientific claims about global warming in the Pope’s
latest encyclical.

"Francis is just repeating what he has heard from
mainstream environmentalists and international green activists. The
problem is that those are apparently the only people he is listening
to….

Pope Francis has sealed himself off in an ideological
bubble that is harder and more impenetrable than the Popemobile. He
refuses to recognize that there are alternative ideas outside the
leftist orthodoxy on capitalism and the environment. The result is a
sense that I’ve never quite gotten before from a papal encyclical: the
sense of the pope as a narrow ideologue, captive to a relatively recent
political fad.

This is a real shame because the Vatican and the
papacy are supposed to operate on a longer time scale, less affected by
the political fads of the moment, or even of the century. After all, the
Catholic Church is a 2,000-year-old institution with a timeless
spiritual remit. It’s what usually makes the popes so interesting to
contend with, even for an atheist who frequently disagrees with them."

But Francis has a whole history of merging leftist politics with
religion in a kind of “reverse syncretism,” a trend I discussed after a
Latin American socialist gave Francis a “Marxifix,” a bizarre mash-up of
the crucifix and the hammer and sickle.

"I am not a Catholic nor even a Christian, and I know
many American Protestants who, shall we say, were never deeply invested
in the moral authority of the pope. So what does it matter to us
whether or not this pope is surrendering the Church to the left?

Historically, it does matter, because in the 20th
century the Church helped change the course of history, vastly for the
better, by offering ideological and material resistance to Communism. It
mattered that there was a large institution with deep historical roots
that was independent from the socialist state and politically correct
orthodoxy, driven a different set of values. And it’s discomforting to
think what might happen if that’s no longer true."

The religion of global warming is being invoked as a reason to overturn
every big institution in our society, from Wall Street to the Vatican.
Yet this is just another false god, based on an illusion.

That’s why the biggest theme in my coverage of global warming this year
was fighting to reassert a truly scientific outlook in the face of
pseudo-scientific propaganda. I debunked the claim that 2014 was the
“hottest year on record.” Expect a repeat for 2015, if they can fudge
the numbers enough. And expect that the real data will indicate the same
thing: that 2015 was about as warm as 2014, which was about as warm as
2010 and 2005. Climate stasis, a plateau in temperatures that has lasted
nearly 20 years now, will be re-defined as a runaway increase, in a
testament to the warmists’ dedication to post-facto rationalization.

"There is an important difference between prediction
before the fact and explanation after the fact. Prediction requires that
you lay down a marker about what the data ought to be, to be consistent
with your theory, before you actually know what it is. That’s something
that’s very hard to get right. If your theory is going to be able to
consistently predict data before it is gathered, it has got to be pretty
darned good. Global warming theories have a wretched track record at
making predictions.

But explanations of data after the fact are a lot
easier. As they say, hindsight is 20/20. It’s a lot easier to tweak your
theory to make it a better fit to the data, or in this case, to tweak
the way the data is measured and analyzed in order to make it better fit
your theory. And then you proclaim how amazing it is that your theory
“explains” the data."

Speaking of predictions, I catalogued seven big failed predictions from
environmentalists, from global cooling to overpopulation. (On that one,
to my great surprise, even the New York Times is starting to come around
— after only 47 years.)

"But by now you can get an idea for the major
outlines of an environmental hysteria. The steps are: a) start with
assumption that man is “ravaging the Earth,” b) latch onto an unproven
scientific hypothesis that fits this preconception, c) extrapolate
wildly from half-formed theories and short-term trends to predict a
future apocalypse, d) pressure a bunch of people with “Ph.D.” after
their names to endorse it so you can say it’s a consensus of experts, e)
get the press to broadcast it with even less nuance and get a bunch of
Hollywood celebrities who failed Freshman biology to adopt it as their
pet cause, then finally f) quietly drop the whole thing when it doesn’t
pan out — and move on with undiminished enthusiasm to the next
environmental doomsday scenario."

I traced that pattern with five more recent debunked claims, including
an astonishing and eye-opening report about “horizontal gene transfer.”
Seriously, the article is worth reading if only for that one piece of
genuine science.

Most fundamentally, I examined what it would really take to prove that
catastrophic global warming is happening and that humans are causing it.
No one ever lays out the steps it would take, because if they did, they
would have to acknowledge how far they are from proving it.

That’s the same reason they’re elevating the imagined threat of global
warming over real and immediate threats like terrorism: because they
don’t want to grapple with the implications. Terrorism is a problem that
calls for solutions the Left doesn’t want to pursue — whereas global
warming calls for solutions they have been longing to implement for more
than a century. It’s almost as if they called the problem into
existence for precisely that reason.

Hence the monumental absurdity of events like the Paris climate summit.
The more important other issues become — the more our political leaders
are called upon to deal with problems whose solutions don’t fit their
agenda — the more they have to double down on the failed predictions,
overinflate the phantom threat, project it as the real root of every
other problem, and then proclaim every minor, ineffectual attempt to
address the problem as a historic achievement of bold leadership.

But behind this there is a palpable desperation. Global warming
persistently remains near the bottom of voter’s priorities — while
terrorism is back on the top of the list. It seems that the more they
try to puff up their phantom menace, the more insubstantial is appears
alongside all of our real problems.

December heatwave shatters record temperatures in south-eastern Australia

Global warming, right? Not quite. In S.E. Queensland
where I live we had an unusually COOL December. So whatever is
going on is not even Australia-wide, let alone global

Sunday night was Sydney's warmest in three years but a cool change will
bring rain over Monday and Tuesday, aiding fire risk reduction efforts
in the Newcastle and Wodonga areas.

It might be hard to recall after the past few days of torrential rain, but December has been hot - the records don't lie.

The extreme heat prompted the Bureau of Meteorology to issue a Special
Climate Statement, confirming record temperatures across South
Australia, NSW, Tasmania and Victoria, where the highest daily minimum
temperature ever recorded was reached (31.9 degrees in Mildura).

"The most intense phase of the heatwave began on December 16 as high
pressure became established in the Tasman Sea and directed hot,
north-easterly winds over South Australia," the bureau said.
Children took to the Nepean River at Penrith as the mercury rose into the 40s on Sunday.

Children took to the Nepean River at Penrith as the mercury rose into the 40s on Sunday. Photo: James Alcock

"The heat spread over much of south-eastern Australia from 18 December
as winds turned more northerly, reaching its most intense levels over
the weekend of 19-20 December. A trough and cold front crossed the
region on 20 December, bringing the heatwave to an end over the
most-affected areas although hot conditions continued over parts of New
South Wales on the 21st."

Sydneysiders have surely not forgotten the night of 20th, when they
sweated through the hottest December night in 15 years, during which the
mercury was still sitting at 29 degrees at 10pm in the city, before
dropping briefly to a low of 22.6 degrees just after 3am.

An extended period of hot weather in South Australia concentrated on
Adelaide, where temperatures reached 40 degrees on each of the four days
from December 16 to 19.

"This was the first occasion that four consecutive days of 40 degrees or
above had occurred in Adelaide in December," the bureau said.

"The highest temperatures of the heatwave occurred on 19 December.
Hottest of all was the upper Spencer Gulf region, where Port Augusta
reached 47.2 degrees, with 45.8 degrees at Whyalla and 45.6 degrees at
Port Pirie."

Bureau senior climatologist Blair Trewin said the South Australian
heatwave was particularly interesting as heatwaves usually occurred in
late summer.

"Systems tend to be more stable and slow moving," he said. "It's unusual
to get a heatwave in December. We've had that a few times in January
and February but never December."

However, the fact a heatwave occurred early in summer did not suggest
even hotter conditions for the coming January and February, Mr Trewin
said.

"The seasonal climate outlook is leaning towards cooler conditions in
much of Victoria and South Australia," he said. "We are experiencing a
strong El Nino, but the main effect of that on temperatures in Southern
Australia is actually in the second half of the year.

"El Nino effects on average temperatures disappear in Southern Australia from January onwards."

In Victoria, El Nino summers tend to bring more extremes at both ends of
the scale, meaning more hot days but also more unusually cool
temperatures as well.

The remarkable global heat experienced this year may not be the last of
it, with forecasters already predicting next year will be hotter again -
marking three years in a row of record annual warmth.

The prediction, by Britain's Met Office, came just days after almost 200
nations agreed in Paris to a new global agreement to tackle climate
change.

Under the pact, to take effect from 2020, nations would review efforts
to curb greenhouse gas emissions every five years with the aim of
keeping temperature increases to "well below 2 degrees" of
pre-industrial levels.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

27 December, 2015

Another brain-dead food shortage scare

Greenies have been making false prophecies of food shortages for
years now. Even Hitler did it. And I have often rebutted them. In
brief: The world's internationally-traded food problem has for a long
time been glut; Warming would open up new agricultural land in
Canada and Russia; Warming should cause more evaporation from the
oceans, thus giving MORE rainfall, not less. A prediction of flood
might make some sense but a prediction of water shortage makes no sense
at all

Widespread water shortages caused by rising global temperatures could
lead to food shortages and mass migration, an expert has warned.

The head of the World Meteorological Society, Michel Jarraud has warned
that of all the threats posed by a warming climate, shrinking water
supplies are the most serious.

It is predicted that by 2025, some 2.8 billion people will live in
'water scarce' areas - a huge rise from the 1.6 billion who do now.

Parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia will be worst affected, with
pockets of Australia, the US and southern Europe also predicted to
suffer.

Mr Jarraud told Carbon Brief that although it has been a few years since
a spate of major food crises, 'all the ingredients are there for a food
crisis to come back on a very large scale.'

Want to know the latest global warming news? Don't bother looking
in U.S. media. They can't be bothered with stories that contradict the
man-made climate change narrative. But the truth is out there.

Let's start with a new paper from NASA — a distinctly American organization — that was covered by the British Express.

The newspaper tells us that our space program has "found the Earth has
cooled in areas of heavy industrialization where more trees have been
lost and more fossil fuel burning takes place."

This is, of course, the opposite of what we've been told for decades.

The Express reports that the findings confirm that the aerosols from
fossil-fuel combustion "actually cool the local environment, at least
temporarily," as they reflect "solar radiation away from the planet."

A NASA official said solar radiation is similarly bounced away from
Earth when "deforestation in northern latitudes" results in bare land
that "increases reflected sunlight."

The Express further reports that the NASA paper's lead author said the
findings show the "complexity" involved in estimating future global
temperatures.

This is something we've been saying for years. While the mainstream
American press can't get off its carbon-dioxide fixation, we've noted
that far too many variables affect global climate to focus on a single
influence.

The British Daily Mail also wrote about this NASA paper, which clearly has high news value.

But the U.S. press couldn't get out of bed to cover the story. As far as
we can tell, the legacy media in this country ignored it entirely.

The same can be said about a study conducted by the Norwegian Polar
Institute, which found "that there are probably more polar bears than
the last time the bears were counted in this area in 2004, in spite of
the fact that there have been many years with poor ice cover during this
period." The American press doesn't want the public to know this
because it throws into doubt the story it's been feeding us since the
1980s.

Remember, we have been told over and again that man-made global warming
was a grave threat to polar bears, which are an endangered species.

Yet here's this study telling us that "scientists now estimate that
there are around 975 polar bears in the Norwegian region, whereas they
estimated a number of 685 in 2004," while another has found them to be
in "excellent" condition, with some being "as fat as pigs."

Indeed, polar bears are making "a surprise comeback."

Finally, in an effort to deliver a public service that the mainstream
media refuse to provide, we point out that the temperature data that
supposedly show warming have been corrupted by poor positioning.

"The majority of weather stations used by (the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration) to detect climate change temperature signal
have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like
concrete, asphalt and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts," says
Anthony Watts, a former meteorologist who is the lead author of a study
of temperature station locations.

Watts believes his work "demonstrates conclusively that this issue
affects temperature trends and that NOAA's methods are not correcting
for this problem, resulting in an inflated temperature trend."

As a result of this systematic error, Watt believes the U.S. temperature record needs to be revised.

Nor is this problem limited to America.

Watts says there's also "evidence of this same sort of siting problem
around the world at many other official weather stations, suggesting
that the same upward bias on trend also manifests itself in the global
temperature record."

All three of these are significant stories. But instead of doing its due
journalistic diligence, the press would rather muse about the role
climate change might be playing in the warm Christmas weather in the
Eastern part of the country.

It's all part of the liberal narrative. Science that doesn't agree with the media's agenda is treated as if it's myth.

The latest scare about man-made global warming is that it is slowing the
earth’s rotation. The reasoning is that ice melting at high latitudes
results in the melt water moving to lower latitudes, which increases the
moment of inertia and slows rotation.

Although this is theoretically correct, the amount would so tiny as to
be immeasurable. However, the Harvard scientist who announced this,
claimed to have found a measurable amount via satellite.

There are all kinds of problems with this. First of all, angular
momentum is conserved, so when the ice reforms the rotation rate will
increase. But again, the amount would be infinitesimally small, so the
whole thing is simply lunch conversation at the physics lab. Okay, but
what about the measured amount?

The earth’s axis wobbles on several periods of rotation and this
probably would cause tiny, but measurable, change in rotational
velocity, but again, angular momentum is conserved and the lost velocity
will return when the axis straitens.

The conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch announced Tuesday that it
is suing the Obama administration to obtain the same internal
communications of federal scientists sought by a House committee in a
dispute over global warming research.

The group said in a news release that it filed a Freedom of Information
Act lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Washington on Dec. 2 against the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, seeking the agency’s
“methodology for collecting and interpreting data used in climate
models.”

The suit stems from an investigation by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.),
chairman of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, into a
blockbuster June study by NOAA scientists that refuted the notion of a
global warming “pause.” The research, published in the peer-reviewed
journal Science, undercut a talking point for skeptics of the conclusion
that the planet’s warming is man-made.

Smith has subpoenaed NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan for the
internal communications of the scientists who did the study, as well as
emails among other staff members. Last week Sullivan gave the committee
about 100 emails written by non-scientists on her staff, but not of the
scientists, which Smith has taken off the table for now.

Judicial Watch said it submitted its Freedom of Information Act request
for the records in late October. After NOAA did not respond, the group
sued. Among the data it is seeking are atmospheric satellite temperature
readings. Smith has said that these readings are more reliable and show
smaller rates of warming than the ocean and land data used in the
study. Climate scientists, including those at NOAA, have said that it’s
the satellite data that is unreliable.

Judicial Watch took credit for prodding NOAA to release the emails to
the committee last week. “We have little doubt that our lawsuit
helped to pry these scandalous climate change report documents from the
Obama administration,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in
a statement.

NOAA has already provided all the data and methodology it says its
scientists used in the study. Agency staff said they had been in
communication with the science committee staff for several weeks before
they handed over the emails.

‘Climatarian’: These People Think Their Diets Will Reverse Global Warming

You’ve heard of vegetarians, but have you heard of “climatarians”?

A climatrian is a new dieting fad among eco-conscious food snobs
purporting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with raising,
transporting and disposing of foods. They believe their dieting choices
will help reverse global warming.

The New York Times even listed climatarians as one of the top new food
words of 2015 along with “hangry,” “piecaken” and “zarf.” The Times
defined a climatarian as a “diet whose primary goal is to reverse
climate change.”

“This includes eating locally produced food (to reduce energy spent in
transportation), choosing pork and poultry instead of beef and lamb (to
limit gas emissions), and using every part of ingredients (apple cores,
cheese rinds, etc.) to limit food waste,” The Times reported last week.

In environmentalist circles, climatarianism has caught on among those
who think veganism isn’t hardcore enough (though being a climatarian is
nowhere near mainstream).

Enviro blog EcoWatch praised the diet in a Tuesday article, claiming the “evidence supporting a climatarian diet is abundant.”

“Several reports within the past year, including one from the UK think
tank Chatham House, have found that eating less meat and dairy is
essential to curbing climate change,” according to EcoWatch. And a
carbon-conscious diet is not only good for the planet, but is healthy
for people, too.”

Increasingly, international groups and environmentalists have been
pushing people to eat less meat, saying it’s not just unhealthy, but is
also bad for the environment. Earlier this year, the United Nations
released a report linking processed meats to cancer.

The U.N. has also encouraged substituting insects in people’s diets as a
way to reduce consumption of beef and pork, which environmentalists
commonly cite as big emitters of greenhouse gases.

Before you go ditching your hamburgers for roasted cockroaches, it’s not
clear that being a “climatarian” is all that good for the environment.
In fact, years of evidence from the “eat local” movement show the tenets
of eco-friendly diets are often worse for the environment than eating a
normal diet.

For example, “locavores” argue locally-grown food is better for the
environment because it reduces the energy use from transportation — all
that gasoline contributes to global warming, they say.

Numerous studies, however, have debunked the idea that locally-grown food is more environmentally friendly.

Efficiencies in agriculture are highly dependent on trade
specialization, meaning certain regions will just be better at growing
things at a lower cost than others. The locavore movement ignores this
central tenet of economics, according to experts.

“Forsaking comparative advantage in agriculture by localizing means it
will take more inputs to grow a given quantity of food, including more
land and more chemicals—all of which come at a cost of carbon
emissions,” agricultural economist Steve Sexton wrote in 2011 for the
blog Freakonomics.

“In order to maintain current output levels for 40 major field crops and
vegetables, a locavore-like production system would require an
additional 60 million acres of cropland, 2.7 million tons more
fertilizer, and 50 million pounds more chemicals,” Sexton wrote. “The
land-use changes and increases in demand for carbon-intensive inputs
would have profound impacts on the carbon footprint of our food, destroy
habitat and worsen environmental pollution.”

Unmentioned is that this is an old idea and that there are already a
lot of these plants around to assess how successful they are. Huge
projects of the sort are already in operation in both California (See here and here) and Spain (See here).
And guess what? They do produce some power but have big problems
and need big subsidies from government to stay in operation

After hours of steady rain, there is not a ray of sunshine in sight and
the mud is thick on the ground at the $20 million Jemalong pilot solar
thermal plant near Forbes in central west New South Wales.

But in a way, the fact it is overcast helps to explain the importance of
this technology, which enables both capture and storage of energy from
the sun, according to James Fisher, chief technology officer of Vast
Solar.

The engineer, who formerly worked in the fossil fuel industry and said
he never thought renewables could compete with coal, now has a much
sunnier outlook on the subject.
Technology behind solar thermal power plant

The Australian company has developed what it hopes will be a low-cost,
high-efficiency Concentrated Solar Power (CSP) generation technology.

The Jemalong pilot plant will be ready for commissioning in mid-January and is designed to prove the technology works.

Five modules of 700 mirrors — or heliostats — will concentrate the sun's
energy onto a receiver mounted on a 27-metre high tower.

Sodium will then be pumped through the receiver where it will be heated up to 565 degrees Celsius and stored in a tank.

When power is needed, the hot sodium will be put through a steam
generator, similar to a big kettle, which will boil the water,
generating steam and driving the turbine in the same way a coal-fired
plant operates.

Mr Fisher said traditional solar or photovoltaic power production
converted the sun's energy directly into electricity which then had to
be stored in expensive batteries.

He said the difference with CSP was that it captured the sun's energy in heat which was cheaper and easier to store.

"So the big advantage with solar thermal is the storage. Our storage
costs around $25 a kilowatt an hour, compared to lithium ion batteries
which cost about $300 a kilowatt hour," Mr Fisher said.

He said the system meant power production could happen whenever it was
needed and until now, that role of maintaining a steady electricity grid
had mainly been provided by coal power.

"We can run 24 hours a day and providing base load is really the key to solar thermal," he said.

Mr Fisher said if the 1.1 megawatt Jemalong pilot proved the technology
was viable for 30 years, billion dollar commercial plants would be
built.

"This sort of technology will put massive amounts of money into regional Australia if it takes off," he said.

Vast Solar has revealed plans for a 30 megawatt commercial plant — at a
yet to be determined location — and Mr Fisher said the company had
progressed well in attracting investment.

"But a problem is it's big money to develop it. These plants you can
only build in large scale, so a tiny plant will be $100 million and a
good-sized plant will be $500 million," Mr Fisher said.

The commissioning process at the Jemalong pilot will take four to six
months and experts ranging from representatives of power utilities to
academics from the Australian National University will be involved.

The project is also being closely watched by the Australian Government's
Renewable Energy Agency, Arena, which has committed $5 million.

Mr Fisher said commercial solar thermal plants could be producing power
at seven cents per kilowatt hour, which was cheaper than the most
up-to-date coal-fired plants.

"I think we'll look back in 50 years and think, 'wow, what were we doing
building coal mines to power a plant that has to run 24-hours a day
when the sunshine's free?'"

He said solar thermal technology had a bright future. "Hopefully it will
be Vast Solar that cracks it but someone will do it, there's no
question in my mind," he said.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

26 December, 2015

Opec faces a mortal threat from electric cars (!)

I don't believe it but the Business Editor of the Telegraph has drawn
together below a great range of optimistic prophecies which claim that
electric cars will become the normal car in the near future. But
prophecies are a dime a dozen in economics and are mostly wrong.
The key of course is a big leap in battery capacity but that is only a
promise so far.

The author below could easily have
quoted problems which puncture his balloon but he prefers to talk only
of do-gooder prophecies. Just off the top of my head:

Take
the problem of winter. Nobody these days would drive an unheated car
during a snowy winter. Yet heating drains batteries at a great
rate. Driving with the heater on can easily halve the distance you
can drive. To overcome that would require a miracle in
battery development.

And then there is the SUV. Where would
a Texan be these days without his big SUV? But SUVs are
heavy and most owners of them like them that way. And electric
cars are usually the opposite of that. They are tiny little bubble
cars. They have to be. They are tiny so that the batteries
don't have to push much weight. A battery-powered SUV is possible but
you won't be able to drive it far.

The failure of a very well-thought-out and well-executed electric car experiment in Israel
is also instructive. As a small densely populated place with a
moderate climate, Israel should have been ideal for electric cars but
the whole thing was a flop.

So I can't see electric cars selling
in the Northern United States because of the winter problem and I can't
see them selling in Texas and other places where SUVs are immensely
popular. That doesn't leave much of a market, does it?

The
greatest marketing flop of all times was Ford's Edsel. And the Edsel was
only a minor change. Ford sunk $250 million into Edsel
development for nothing. And that was in the late '50s when a
dollar was worth a dollar. The funds being poured into electric
cars are far greater than that but are equally no greater guarantee of
success

OPEC’s World Oil Outlook released today is a remarkable document, the
apologia of a pre-modern vested interest that refuses to see the writing
on the wall.

The underlying message is that the COP21 deal is of no relevance to the
oil industry. Pledges by world leaders to drastically alter the
trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions before 2040 - let alone to reach
total "decarbonisation" by 2070 - are simply ignored.

Global demand for crude oil will rise by 18m barrels a day (b/d) to 110m
by 2040. The cartel has shaved its long-term forecast slightly by 1m
b/d, but this is in part due to weaker economic growth.

One is tempted to compare this myopia to the reflexive certainties of
the 16th Century papacy, even as Erasmus published in Praise of Folly,
and Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle
Church.

The 407-page report swats aside electric vehicles with impatience. The
fleet of cars in the world will rise from 1bn to 2.1bn over the next 25
years – topping 400m in China – and 94pc will still run on petrol and
diesel.

“Without a technology breakthrough, battery electric vehicles are not
expected to gain significant market share in the foreseeable future,” it
said. Electric cars cost too much. Their range is too short. The
batteries are defective in hot or cold conditions.

OPEC says battery costs may fall by 30-50pc over the next quarter
century but doubts that this will be enough to make much difference, due
to "consumer resistance".

This is a brave call given that Apple and Google have thrown their vast
resources into the race for plug-in vehicles, and Tesla's Model 3s will
be on the market by 2017 for around $35,000.

Ford has just announced that it will invest $4.5bn in electric and
hybrid cars, with 13 models for sale by 2020. Volkswagen is to unveil
its "completely new concept car" next month, promising a new era of
"affordable long-distance electromobility."

The OPEC report is equally dismissive of Toyota's decision to bet its
future on hydrogen fuel cars, starting with the Mirai as a loss-leader.
One should have thought that a decision by the world's biggest car
company to end all production of petrol and diesel cars by 2050 might be
a wake-up call.

Goldman Sachs expects 'grid-connected vehicles' to capture 22pc of the
global market within a decade, with sales of 25m a year, and by then -
it says - the auto giants will think twice before investing any more
money in the internal combustion engine. Once critical mass is reached,
it is not hard to imagine a wholesale shift to electrification in the
2030s.

Goldman is betting that battery costs will fall by 60pc over the next
five years, driven by economies of scale as much as by technology. The
driving range will increase by 70pc.

This is another world from OPEC's forecast. Even this may well be
overtaken soon by further leaps in science. A team of Cambridge chemists
says it has cracked the technology of a lithium-air battery with 90pc
efficiency, able to power a car from London to Edinburgh on a single
charge. It promises to cut costs by four-fifths, and could be on the
road within a decade.

There is now a global race to win the battery prize. The US Department
of Energy is funding a project by the universities of Michigan,
Stanford, and Chicago, in concert with the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley
national laboratories. The Japan Science and Technology Agency has its
own project in Osaka. South Korea and China are mobilising their
research centres.

A regulatory squeeze is quickly changing the rules of global energy.The
Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics counts 800 policies
and laws aimed at curbing emissions worldwide.

Goldman Sachs says the model to watch is Norway, where electric vehicles
already command 16.3pc of the market. The switch has been driven by tax
exemptions, priority use of traffic lanes, and a forest of charging
stations. [And acceptance of tiny cars]

California is following suit. It has a mandatory 22pc target for
'grid-connected' vehicles within ten years. New cars in China will have
to meet emission standards of 5 litres per 100km by 2020, even stricter
than in Europe.

Beijing's pilot scheme to promote electric cars has fallen short -
chiefly because there are not yet enough charging sites - but this will
change soon with drastic rationing of permits for petrol cars. If you
want a car as the authorities grapple with 'airpocalypse', it may have
to be electric.

China's Geely Automobile aims to generate 90pc of its sales from
electric vehicles by 2020. Bill Russo from Gao Feng Advisory in Shanghai
says China is about to "leapfrog" the rest of the world and become the
epicentre of the electrification drive.

OPEC does not deny that the Paris accords change the energy landscape,
but they view this as a problem strictly for the coal industry. There
will be a partial switch from coal to gas, with a little nuclear thrown
in, along with a risible contribution from wind and solar.

Their own charts seems to show that coal, gas, and oil will together
emit a further 1,200 gigatonnes of carbon by 2040. This would blow
through the maximum carbon budget deemed allowable by scientists if we
are to stop temperatures rising by more than 2 degrees above
pre-industrial levels by 2100 - let alone to achieve the 1.5 degree
'ambition' agreed by world leaders in Paris.

Saudi Arabia's belief that it can carry on with business as usual into
the mid 21st Century is what informs the current OPEC strategy of
flooding the crude market to eliminate rivals.

The report admits that this is proving to be a costly undertaking. Tight
oil and shale in North America has not buckled - as presumed in last
year's forecast - and OPEC now expects it to keep rising slightly in
2016 to 4.5m b/d, and again to 4.7m in 2017.

In the meantime, OPEC revenues have crashed from $1.2 trillion in 2012
to nearer $400bn at today's Brent price of $36.75, with fiscal and
regime pain to match.

This policy has eroded global spare capacity to a wafer-thin 1.5m b/d,
leaving the world vulnerable to a future shock. It implies a far more
volatile market in which prices gyrate wildly, eroding confidence in oil
as a reliable source of energy.

The more that this Saudi policy succeeds, the quicker the world will
adopt policies to break reliance on its only product. As internal
critics in Riyadh keep grumbling, the strategy is suicide.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are lucky. They have been warned in
advance that OPEC faces slow-run off. The cartel has 25 years to prepare
for a new order that will require far less oil.

If they have any planning sense, they will manage the market to ensure
crude prices of $70 to $80. They will eke out their revenues long enough
to control spending and train their people for a post-petrol economy,
rather than clinging to 20th Century illusions.

Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister, warned in an
interview with the Telegraph fifteen years ago that this moment of
reckoning was coming and he specifically cited fuel-cell technologies.

"Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no
buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end,
not because we had a lack of stones."

Jose Duarte is one of the few genuine scientists in social
psychology. I am in a position to know that. Over a period
of 20 years beginning in 1970 I encountered countless pieces of
published social psychological research that were so flawed that they
proved nothing. And that's not just my opinion. I put my thoughts
into writing and on many occasions, journal editors saw that I had a
point and published my critiques.

And it is notable that they did so. Journal editors HATE
publishing critiques. It exposes their own review processes as
inadequate. So I had to be making a very strong scientific case in
what I wrote. So the fact that more than half of my critiques did
get into the journals is actually rather amazing.

What I found was that any thin excuse to come to a Leftist conclusion
will get published. Nothing else much seemed to matter as long as
there was a veneer of scientific method to it. It was actually
common for authors to come to conclusions which were contradicted by
their own data! Their urgent priority was to prop up their
fallacious Leftist wordview. That trumped everything else.
More on that here.

So I gave it 20 years of doing social psychological research but in the
end concluded that I was pissing into the wind. Truth and the
facts were just not of interest to most of my colleagues and my pointing
the facts out was CERTAINLY not of interest. The Leftist talent
at denial -- ignoring uncomfortable facts -- was in full force when it
came to my writings.

So over two decades ago I gave up doing survey research and concentrated
on family and business interests instead, with results that please
me. I still occasionally read the literature, however and I am
pleased that there is a small band of real scientists trying to make
social psychology more scientific. Duarte is one, as are Jonathan
Haidt, Lee Jussim and that old hand, Philip Tetlock.

Those four obviously know one-another. They were co-authors of a
paper 18 months ago that pointed out what I have just said about
ideological bias in psychology. The paper is:

It appeared earlier this year but a preprint was available from around
July, 2014. There is a Readers Digest form of the paper here

Why am I noting this on a blog devoted to tracking
environmentalism? Because the situation in climate science is
incomparably worse than in psychology. The global warming
enthusiasts make the psychologists look rigorous. And Jose Duarte has
noticed that. Below are some of his astounded comments on the
subject. He is looking particularly at the risible "97% consensus"
studies that have come out, particularly the study by John Cook, a
psychologist from the University of Queensland in Australia.

If some third world political leader gets 97% of the vote, we know
immediately that the vote was rigged and laugh at the naivety of the
leader in thinking anyone would believe that figure. Yet Warmists
do exactly the same. They are too fanatical to see how absurd they
are. Their need to believe has overcome their reason and sense of
caution. Their claims are not even good propaganda.

But over to Duarte. He details just how bad the Warmist studies are:

"Ignore climate consensus studies based on random people rating journal
article abstracts. Ignore them completely – that's your safest bet right
now. Most of these studies use political activists as the raters,
activists who desired a specific outcome for the studies (to report the
highest consensus figure possible), and who sometimes collaborated with
each other in their rating decisions. All of this makes these studies
completely invalid and untrustworthy (and by customary scientific
standards, completely unpublishable.) I had no idea this was happening.
This is a scam and a crisis. It needs to stop, and those papers need to
be retracted immediately, especially Cook, et al (2013), given that we
now have evidence of explicit bias and corruption on the part of the
raters. (It's crazy that people think the consensus needs to be
artificially inflated to absurd heights – do they think 84% or 90% isn't
good enough?)

In social science, it's common to use trained human raters to
subjectively rate or score some variable — it can be children's behavior
on a playground, interviews of all kinds, and often written material,
like participants' accounts of a past emotional experience. And we have a
number of analytical and statistical tools that go with such rating
studies. But we would never use human raters who have an obvious bias
with respect to the subject of their ratings, who desire a specific
outcome for the study, and who would be able to deliver that outcome via
their ratings. That's completely nuts. It's so egregious that I don't
think it even occurs to us as something to look out for. It never
happens. At least I've never heard of it happening. There would be no
point in running such a study, since it would be dismissed out of hand
and lead to serious questions about your ethics.

But it's happening in climate science. Sort of. These junk studies are
being published in climate science journals, which are probably not
well-equipped to evaluate what are ultimately social science studies (in
method). And I assume the journals weren't aware that these studies
used political activists as raters.

Examples of the unbelievable bias and transparent motives of the raters'
in Cook, et al (2013) below. These are excerpts from an online forum
where the raters collaborated with each other in their ratings:

"BTW, this was the only time I "cheated" by looking at the whole
paper. I was mystified by the ambiguity of the abstract, with the author
wanting his skeptical cake and eating it too. I thought, "that smells
like Lindzen" and had to peek."

"Man, I think you guys are being way too conservative. Papers that
talk about other GHGs causing warming are saying that human GHG
emissions cause global warming. How is that not an implicit
endorsement? If CFC emissions cause warming because they're GHGs,
then CO2 emissions cause global warming for the same reason.
That's an implicit endorsement."

Jesus. This is a joke. A sad, ridiculous, confusing joke. And it's
exactly what you'd expect from raters who are political activists on the
subject they're rating. Who in their right minds would use political
climate activists as raters for a serious report on the consensus? This
is so nuts that I still have a hard time believing it actually happened,
that the famous 97% paper was just a bunch of activists rating
abstracts. I've called on the journal – Environmental Research Letters –
to retract this paper. I'm deeply, deeply confused how this happened.
If this is what we're doing, we should just call it a day and go home –
we can't trust journals and science organizations on this topic if
they're going to pull stunts like this.

I don't care who you are – even if you're a staunch liberal, deeply
concerned about the environment and the effects of future warming, this
isn't something you should tolerate. If we're going to have a
civilization, if we're going to have science, some things need to be
non-political, some basic rules need to apply to everyone. I hope we can
all agree that we can't seriously estimate the AGW consensus by having
political activists rate climate paper abstracts. It doesn't matter
whether the activists come from the Heritage Foundation or the Sierra
Club – people with a vested interest in the outcome simply can't be
raters.

We don't need random people to interpret climate science for us, to
infer the meaning of abstracts, to tell us what scientists think. That's
an awful method – extremely vulnerable to bias, noise, incompetence,
and poor execution. The abstracts for many papers won't even have the
information such studies are looking for, and are simply not written at
the level of abstraction of "this study provides support for
human-caused warming", or "this study rejects human-caused warming".
Most climate science papers are written at a more granular and technical
level, are appropriately scientifically modest, and are not meant to be
political chess pieces.

There's a much better method for finding out what scientists think — ask
them. Direct surveys of scientists is a much more valid method than
having ragtag teams of unqualified political activists divine the
meanings of thousands of abstracts. I don't mean ask about them their
abstracts, as Cook, et al did – that inserts an unnecessary layer and
potential selection bias. I mean ask them directly what they think about
the principal questions. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, survey
studies tend to report smaller consensus figures than the abstract
rating studies (I'll have more on that later, see the Bray and von
Storch series for now) The consensus will be strong regardless, so it's
especially confusing why people feel the need to rig it.

(For subjective ratings of abstracts to be a valid and useful method, it
would need to be a carefully selected pool of raters, without
ideological agendas, implementing a very specific and innovative method,
under strict procedures of independence. I can imagine deep philosophy
of science questions that might be anwerable by such methods, things
like the usage of certain kinds of words, the way hypotheses are framed
and results reported, etc. – but much of that could be done by
computers. The studies that have been published are nothing like this,
and have no hope of being valid.)

NOTE: The Cook, et al data was leaked or hacked a few months ago – I'm
confused by what's going on here. Cook wouldn't release some of his
data, and ultimately a bunch of data was hacked or scraped off a server,
and it included the raters' online discussion forum. Climate science
features far too many stories of people refusing to release their data,
and mysteriously hacked data. The person who posted this data, Brandon
Shollenberger, is a complete unknown. It's amazing that if it weren't
for him, we wouldn't know how rigged the study truly was. There's much
more to report – the issues raised by the leaked dataset extend far
beyond the quotes above.

The University of Queensland has apparently threatened to sue
Schollenberger, on some sort of "intellectual property" grounds.
Australia is one of my favorite countries, but we need to stand up for
him. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn't done anything wrong – he
hasn't posted any sort of sensitive information or anything that would
violate our core principles of scientific ethics. The identities of the
raters were not confidential to begin with, so there was no new
disclosure there. He's exposed the cartoonish bias and corruption of the
rating process that underlied this "study", and in so doing, he's
served the interests of scientific ethics, not violated them".

Much more from Duarte HERE. See also here
for another searching critique of the Cook et al. paper. The
extraordinary actions of the University of Queensland in defence of Cook
are detailed here.

The original Cook paper is here.
Cook is in fact usually misquoted by Warmists. People allege that
Cook showed that 97% OF ALL climate scientists support global
warming. Cook did not say that at all. He said: "Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW,
97.1% endorsed the consensus position that humans are causing global
warming". And he adds that two thirds of the papers took no position on
global warming (which was wise of them). So even in Cook's own words he
showed that a MINORITY of papers supported global warming. The 97%
was not of all scientists nor even of climate scientists. It was
97% of a minority of climate scientists. Below again is that
amusing video of a poor bewildered black man using like a crutch Cook's
misquoted findings. The habitual misquoting just shows how
desperate Warmists are.

So although Cook's research methods were rubbish and a disgrace to
psychology, I am inclined to think that he is more sinned against than
sinning. I would be quite happy to quote his figures in any debate
with a Warmist. The only difference would be that I would quote
what he ACTUALLY said rather than what Warmists say he said! LOL

"The kinetic energy of wind, equivalent to ~10 billion barrels of oil,
has in the past blown our ~6,000,000 billion tons of air at a speed of
~15 mph continuously around the Earth, bringing us rain and cooling.

But now, humans have built and are building more windmills that are
reducing this natural cooling process. Present level of reduction is
~10%. There is no mechanism in nature that replenishes wind energy
removed by humans."

Tear down all windmills!

Via email

California Governor Hails ‘Coercive Power of Government’

A genuine Fascist

California Gov. Jerry Brown raised some eyebrows while attending the
U.N. Climate Summit in Paris this month, proclaiming that the “coercive
power of the central state” is needed to promote good public policy,
specifically when it comes to a cleaner environment.

Taking part in an onstage presentation with billionaire and climate
activist Tom Steyer, Brown said government regulations force companies
to adopt clean technologies.

After Steyer mentioned business frameworks, Brown said, “Tom, you used
the phrase ‘policy.’ Good policy. But I want to unpack that term a
little bit. Inside the policy, you need a law. You need a rule. You need
the coercive power of government to say, ‘Do this.’ Now, you have to be
wise and don’t say something stupid or order something stupid, but the
fact is, the regulations supported by the laws drive innovation.”

The Sacramento Bee reported that Brown later urged a small crowd to
“never underestimate the coercive power of the central state in the
service of good.”

The Brown administration has been aggressive in instituting stricter environmental laws and regulations in California.

In October, the four-term governor signed legislation calling on
California to generate half of its electricity from sources such as
solar and wind by 2030. At the same time, the law mandates that homes,
offices, and factories double their energy efficiency.

Such moves have prompted opposition from the energy industry, saying
they will raise utility bills and gasoline prices, and Brown’s comments
in Paris drew a swift reaction from critics, who seized on the
“coercion” remark.

“Gov. Brown’s statement is a frank admission that politicians and
government in the U.S. are out of control,” said Dan Kish, senior vice
president at the Institute for Energy Research, a public policy
organization that calls for free-market solutions on energy policy.

“The governor bragged about the ‘coercive powers of government’ and how
his state would keep regulating and taxing. The United States was formed
to put citizens in charge of their lives by putting a fence around
government power and control,” Kish said in an email to Watchdog.org.

“Gov. Brown has shown he thinks people should be inside the fence, with
government, and their crony business partners, using its coercive and
taxing powers to make them do what the politicians say, and it’s
illustrative he is doing it at the Climate Summit in Paris. This is how
freedom is lost and tyranny and coercion prevail.”

Brown led a California delegation in Paris that includes Steyer; Senate
President Pro Tem Kevin De León, D-Los Angeles; and other state
legislators.

Brown made the remarks in a discussion about reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“This is an art and a science,” Brown said. “You have to push business
further than they want to go, but within their capacity to reach it.”

Clean power companies have long been criticized for their reliance on
federal and state subsidies and tax credits, with the bankruptcy of
California-based solar company Solyndra used as a prime example. The
U.S. Department of Energy awarded Solyndra $536 million in loan
guarantees prior to the company’s collapse in 2011.

Green energy advocates have defended the subsidies, arguing that fossil
fuel industries have long received tax credits and that government help
is often a necessity to launch companies that require large start-up
costs.

“Just as with any other major economic transition—the Industrial
Revolution, the Marshall Plan, the fall of Communism—there is a role for
government policy, finance and investment in speeding the adoption of
the new, while easing the phaseout of the old,” Kate Gordon, vice chair
at the Paulson Institute, said in an opinion piece in the Wall Street
Journal earlier this year.

At a news conference in Paris, K.R. Sridhar, CEO of the fuel cell
technology company Bloom Energy, said it would be wrong to single out
renewable companies, saying that taxpayers pay for highway and road
maintenance that benefits gasoline-powered cars.

Clean technology, the Bee quoted Sridhar, only needs a “helping hand,”
not a permanent subsidy. “For us,” Sridhar said, “it’s a feeding bottle
and not an addiction bottle.”

Meet the House science chairman who’s trying to put global warming research on ice

The article below was apparently intended as a hit piece but I think it celebrates a doughty devotee of truth

When Republican House leaders appointed Texas Republican Lamar S. Smith
to lead the House science committee after a headline-grabbing run as
chairman of the Judiciary panel, it looked like the veteran lawmaker
could head into obscurity.

He had previously championed an end to automatic citizenship for
children born in the United States and riled up advocates for freedom of
expression on the Internet. Yet Smith’s new role in 2013 as the House’s
science boss seemed less influential, leading a committee viewed as a
backwater and first stop for freshman lawmakers.

But he quickly remade the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
into a bulldog as ferocious as any in a Congress riven by partisanship.
As the Obama administration escalated its fight against climate change
with new environmental regulations, the lawyer from San Antonio, Tex.
became a key player among the holdouts.

As lawyers and lobbyists were devising legal strategies to try to
dismantle the president’s climate-change agenda, Smith became the
lawmaker bent on debunking the science behind it.

Now finishing his third year as chairman, the Yale-educated lawmaker who
has represented Texas Hill Country and parts of Austin and San Antonio
since 1987 has used new subpoena powers to an unprecedented degree.

He’s called on the administration to account for air-pollution
regulations he says are not backed up by science. He’s tried to slash
NASA’s budget for earth sciences. He’s subjected grant reviews at the
National Science Foundation to extra scrutiny. One of Congress’s most
prominent global warming skeptics, Smith, 68, has railed against
environmentalists and the media for buying into the “climate-change
religion.”

In the fall he took on his biggest target yet, accusing federal
scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of
colluding to doctor data in a pivotal global warming study that refuted
the long-held notion that the planet’s warming had “paused.”

“He’s taken the science committee to a new level,” said Rep. Barry
Loudermilk (R-Ga.), a freshman who leads the committee’s oversight
panel. “We’re challenging the status quo… You’re talking about very
significant regulations imposed by this administration. We’re asking,
‘Is the science behind them valid?'”

His detractors accuse Smith of taking oversight to a new level of
bullying by questioning the motives of federal scientists and
threatening their freedom. Critics say he’s out of step with mainstream
scientific thinking on climate change, which concludes that man-made
pollution is behind the planet’s warming.

His confrontation with NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan started over
the summer, soon after a team of scientists on her staff published their
findings on the global warming pause in the peer-reviewed journal
Science.

Smith accused the scientists of altering historical global temperature
data and rushing to publish their research to advance Obama’s “extreme
climate agenda.” The chairman subpoenaed the scientists and other NOAA
staff and demanded that they turn over internal emails related to their
research.

Sullivan balked for weeks, finally releasing about 100 emails from
non-scientists last week that NOAA officials say contain none of the
evidence Smith is seeking. Meanwhile, prominent societies representing
thousands of scientists have rallied around her, warning the congressman
in a letter in November that his efforts are “establishing a practice
of inquests.”

“He is bringing more prominence to the committee by challenging the
integrity of scientists,” said Rush Holt, a physicist and New Jersey
Democrat who served with Smith in the House from 1999 until this year.

“It’s an interesting way to raise the profile of a science committee,”
said Holt, now chief executive officer of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science. “In fact it seems to be Smith who is
substituting politics for evidence and not the scientists.”

Smith, through his staff, declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article or to answer questions by email.

He and his allies reject criticism that he is politicizing science as
head of a committee that oversees space exploration, research and
development and has jurisdiction over agencies from NOAA to the National
Institute of Standards and Technology. They say it’s the government
that’s doing just that in the service of excessive federal regulation of
the environment, with mandates that threaten the economy and crucial
industries like gas, oil and coal.

“His constituents see a man that’s fighting for the energy community
here in Texas, which is a large part of the employment base,” said
Charles McConnell, who served two years in the Obama administration as
assistant secretary for the Energy Department, responsible for fossil
fuels. Now at Rice University, McConnell has criticized new
Environmental Protection Agency air quality regulations as “rampant
environmentalism.”

“I don’t believe Smith is against regulation,” said McConnell, who has
testified before the committee. “He’s interested in scientifically based
regulation.”

As the climate change summit got underway in Paris in November, the
science committee held a hearing whose title revealed precisely where
Smith stands: “Pitfalls of Unilateral Negotiations at the Paris Climate
Change Conference.”

Two of the three witnesses the Republicans called to testify were not
scientists, but policy experts representing conservative think tanks, a
common practice at hearings. Other witnesses have affiliations with the
energy industry, Democrats complain.

Earlier this year, Smith issued a subpoena to compel the Environmental
Protection Agency to produce text messages and phone records for
Administrator Gina McCarthy as it investigated proposed limits on ozone
it said would amount to the most costly federal regulation in history.

He has also demanded EPA cor­res­pond­ence with out­side groups on a
range of en­vir­on­ment­al rules and reg­u­lat­ions, to show that they
collaborated with the administration, for example in curtailing
power-plant emissions.

Supporters say the chairman’s roots in Texas —a state that has objected
strenuously to EPA rules slashing ozone levels and pollution from
coal-fired power plants —form the core of his skepticism.

“Scrutiny of global warming started here,” said Michael Nasi, an Austin
air-quality lawyer who represents many of the state’s electric power
producers. “It’s incumbent on any federal lawmaker to be asking, are we
looking at controls that will really have legitimate health benefits?”
Texas regulators, for example, have questioned whether EPA’s emissions
crackdown would really improve public health.

On the foundational question of whether human behavior is behind the
earth’s rising temperatures, Smith has been called a truth seeker, a
climate skeptic and a climate denier. He is fond of saying that “good
science” should rule the day, while his detractors say it’s Smith who
has lost sight of good science.

Just before he was installed as committee chairman, Smith said in a
statement in response to questions from reporters that he believes
climate change “is due to a combination of factors, including natural
cycles, sun spots, and human activity.”

“But scientists still don’t know for certain how much each of these
factors contributes to the overall climate change that the Earth is
experiencing.”

Don’t believe the eco-hype: For all the optimism about wind and solar, renewables are nowhere near viable

After COP21, the Paris conference on climate change, it’s time to puncture green euphoria about renewable energy

Among greens, technological innovation is the new black. After all,
dissing the plebs for their ignorant and greedy, carbon-guzzling
behaviour hasn’t proved very popular. Similarly, protesting coal-fired
power stations in Asia has cut little ice. So now environmentalists have
conveniently discovered that technological innovation in wind and solar
power will rapidly supply much of the world’s electricity.

Since 2008, the US has wanted wind power to account for a fifth of its
electricity generated by 2030, up from 4.5 per cent today. Likewise,
presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton envisages America as the
‘clean-energy superpower’, one where renewables generate ‘at least a
third’ of electricity as early as 2027. Now the Paris Agreement upholds
what it calls ‘universal access to sustainable energy in developing
countries, in particular in Africa, through the enhanced deployment of
renewable energy’. Indeed, at the Paris talks, US secretary of state
John Kerry proclaimed ‘clean’ energy to be ‘cheaper against today’s
alternatives’.

Is any of this credible? No. We are in no shape to make renewable
electricity supplant the conventional sort within the next 15 years.

The dishonesty of green tech

During COP21, the US, much of Europe, China, India and several other
major nations launched Mission Innovation, aimed at doubling research
and development (R&D) into renewables by 2020. Significantly, Bill
Gates and 28 other billionaire investors joined the mission. For Gates,
this intrepid group of ‘patient’ capitalists has a philanthropic goal:
the investors’ aim is ‘as much to accelerate innovation as it is to turn
a profit’. Gates hopes that, over at least a decade, photovoltaic
panels might morph into ‘solar paint’; rechargeable electrolyte in
batteries, or ‘flow batteries’, might beat the lithium-ion sort; and
sunshine might help make hydrogen and hydrocarbons in a process he calls
‘solar-chemical’.

While Gates believes that renewables need big improvements in clout and
cost, Kerry imagines they’re already profitable – even without the
subsidies they bask in. As he told COP21, renewables today are ‘one of
the greatest economic opportunities the world has ever known’, and
investors can now ‘do well and do good at the same time’. To complete
the euphoria at the Paris talks, solar power in developing countries
enjoyed special support. Thus, on top of Mission Innovation, a second
key initiative emerged alongside COP21. Launched by India and France,
the International Solar Alliance brings together around 120 tropical
nations to attract $1,000 billion of investment in solar by 2030. The
aim: to cheapen existing solar technologies, but also develop new ones
‘tailored to the specific needs of members of the Alliance’.

What dishonesty surrounds green tech! Today, ‘tailoring’ solar to the
reputed needs of developing countries won’t build them the kind of
electricity capacity that can continuously power ‘factories,
skyscrapers, and other large consumers of energy’, as Gates rightly
observes is necessary. Drawn up by international elites and the United
Nations, the official programme for developing countries in solar is
paltry by comparison. It plans to give the rural poor ‘access’ to
electricity that’s ‘decentralised whenever possible and based on clean
energy’.

As ever, climate negotiations form a diplomatic charade that only
reveals the West’s grimy conception of how the developing world should
develop – with just enough low-tech, low-output green electricity-lite
to power a village hut, no more.

The idea that solar panels have now reached ‘grid parity’, or price
equivalence with fossil fuel-powered electricity, is another charade.
According to the US Energy Information Administration, the efficiency of
solar (12 per cent) and wind (26 per cent) remains way below the
efficiency notched up by conventional power plants, such as gas (42.9
per cent).

Yes, solar efficiencies have improved, but it has taken decades – and
strides have mostly been made in laboratories, not under the more
arduous conditions of everyday use. The economies of scale and subsidies
enjoyed by Chinese manufacturers of solar panels have bankrupted their
rivals and lowered prices. Yet with improvements in efficiency so slow,
panels will go on occupying a lot of land, or roof space, for years and
years. That will keep their installed costs buoyant, as well as
counteract the falling costs of installation, maintenance and financing
that US solar-services firms have recently achieved.

As Gates’ proposal for solar paint suggests, buildings and especially
homes, not expansive ‘farms’ of panels, remain the principal units of
account for solar power. Yet how can household panels, still less those
mounted atop blocks of flats, provide enough reliable energy to power
fleets of computer servers and trains, still less the processes
involving heat that are at the core of making steel and cement? Solar
can never be an easily concentrated, continuous source of baseload power
in the way that fossil-fuel-fired and nuclear-power stations can be.
Every spurious exaggeration of solar power’s capabilities in developing
countries consigns them to stunted development – to intermittent, weak
electricity.

Perhaps better battery storage of energy – including flow batteries –
offers hope. Yet here, too, illusions are enormous. Storage will add to
the costs of wind and solar. Moreover, even the breakthrough lithium-air
battery, just announced by Dr Clare Grey at Cambridge University, will
require at least a decade to be commercialised.

Why we need R&D

One of the chief dangers emerging from COP21 is that the misconception
that renewables are saving the planet, along the lines of Germany’s
disastrous, nuclear-free ‘energy transformation’, will now be taken as
given.

Now, of course, no silver bullet will solve the issues of energy supply;
so, for all their depressing intermittency, wind and solar power
deserve, in principle, the kind of large and long-term R&D budgets
that fossil fuels and nuclear power ought to enjoy. But, in fact,
R&D expenditures by the West on renewables are, like those on fossil
fuels and nuclear, utterly negligible. In 2014, Europe spent just $1.52
billion on R&D for renewables, while the US and Canada spent $1.08
billion. As for R&D in fossil fuels, Europe spent a mere $0.57
billion; the US and Canada, just $0.8 billion.

Yes, on a good day wind turbines can now generate a lot of a country’s
electricity; yes, the price of solar electricity is now going down; and
yes, innovation always needs to think about the longterm. But in the
case of renewables, reliably generating a quarter of the world’s
electricity at prices that compare well with fossil fuels and nuclear
will have to wait until 2040 or later, not 2030. Even then, renewables
will still need a lot of fossil-fuel backup to ensure continuous
electricity generation.

Governments, and now philanthropically minded capitalists, may stress
the ‘creative’ side of the creative destruction of the fossil-fuel and
nuclear industries. Yet the preference for renewables has up to now
meant subsidising yesterday’s technologies more than spending on
tomorrow’s R&D. So, despite all the self-loathing of the fossil-fuel
and nuclear industries, and despite the relative lack of profitability
of nuclear, renewables will not wreak destruction on them for a long
time to come.

There is simply not enough investment being made in new industries to
eradicate the old. Capitalism is barely interested in general investment
and innovation – let alone investment in energy, where the installed
base and sunk costs of fossil-fuel infrastructure will only be overcome
over decades.

John Kerry can claim that ‘over the next 15 years, $17 trillion is
expected to be invested in energy, and the vast majority of that is
going to be in clean energy, thank heavens’. But such a flow of
investment into renewables is about as likely as the widely ridiculed
‘flows’ of renewables promised to developing countries by developed
ones.

The numbers say it all. Kerry promises trillions of investment, when, in
fact, the amount of credit extended by the West to help companies sell
wind and, to a much lesser extent, solar power to the richer developing
economies (‘middle-income countries’) was just $1.6 billion in 2013-14.
And North America and Europe’s R&D budgets for renewables, are, as
we have seen, even less than that.

So, don’t buy the hype: for a quarter century or more, renewables won’t
make much of a difference to the world’s electricity supply.

How the Post-Soviet Left Latched Onto Climate For its Crusade on Capitalism

By CONRAD BLACK

The opening of the Paris conference on climate change will be the
occasion for the customary lamentations about the imminent demise of
life on Earth if we do not pull up our socks as a species and reduce
carbon emission levels, and thus avoid the toasting of the world. The
adduced scientific evidence does not justify any such state of alarm.

Every sane and informed person in the world is concerned about pollution
and demands vigilance about any clear trends of climate change and any
convincing evidence that human behavior influences the climate. Because
the Copenhagen climate Conference of 2009 had promised agreement on
imposition of dramatic measures to reduce fossil fuel use and resulting
carbon emissions, thus avoiding apprehended rises in world temperature,
and broke up in acrimonious farce and recrimination, the Paris
conference has been more carefully and less ambitiously prepared.

At Copenhagen, the demand arose from developing countries that the
economically advanced countries had permanently impaired the
under-developed countries and that the $100 billion compensation fund
that President Obama had promised to raise for the less-advanced
countries was completely inadequate, mere reparations instead of a
serious response to a moral debt that could only be quantified in
trillions of dollars. (Mr. Obama had no takers, including his own
Congress, when his Democrats controlled it, for one cent of such
payments.)

Mr. Obama was unable even to get an interview with the Chinese prime
minister, a historic first in lack of access for a U.S. president, as
the Chinese, by far the greatest carbon emitter and polluter of all
countries, cheekily set themselves at the head of the G-77 countries who
with cupped hands and in stentorian voice, demanded immense monetary
compensation for the sins of the carbon emitters, also led by
themselves.

The world’s temperature has risen approximately one half of a centigrade
degree, or almost one Fahrenheit degree, in 35 years. There has been
minimal global warming for 18 years, though carbon emissions in the
world have steadily increased throughout that period. It is indisputable
that the world has been warmer several times in its history than it is
now, so whatever impact man may have on it, the world’s temperature is
evidently subject to fluctuations for other reasons.

There is also legitimate disagreement about the consequences of such
warming as might occur. Recent research at the University of Sussex,
widely recognized for its expertise in this field, indicates that
warming up to 3.5 centigrade degrees from where we are now would have no
appreciable impact on anything, except a positive impact where
increased volumes of carbon dioxide increase arable area and make crops
more drought-resistant.

Also there has been a good deal of reciprocally corroborating research
in different countries by recognized experts that uniformly demonstrates
that the world’s temperature is much less sensitive than had long been
feared to increased carbon use. Antarctic polar ice is thickening and
world water levels are not rising. Apocalyptic statements of imminent
consequences of not reducing carbon use have been fairly thoroughly
debunked.

Not only is the evidence of the effects of increased carbon use unclear,
but the economic consequences of discouragement of carbon use are very
clear and very harmful to the most vulnerable countries. China and
India, the two most populous countries and the first and third carbon
emitters, are eagerly pursuing economic growth, which is the only method
for pulling the many hundreds of millions of desperately poor people in
those countries upwards out of poverty, and they are not going to
change policy to accommodate the militant ecologists of the West.

They don’t attach the slightest credence to the alarmist comments of the
more strident ecologists, other than as an excuse for demanding
monetary compensation for how the economically leading countries have
disadvantaged them. The International Energy Agency estimates that the
underdeveloped countries as a group, will emit 70 per cent of the carbon
output of the world in the next 15 years, and will be responsible for
all of the increase in carbon use over that time.

President Obama has called the Paris conference a “historic turning
point,” but it isn’t, and claimed (in February) that climate change was a
greater problem than terrorism. He and John Kerry (secretary of state),
have several times called it the world’s greatest problem. This is
bunk. The pope stated that we are “at the edge of suicide.” If so, it is
not for climatic reasons. (The Holy See has placated the greens, but
emphasized that “The Church cannot take the place of scientists and
politicians.”)

Many in those groups are more impetuous in their assertions. And
everyone seriously involved with the Paris conference knows that it is
not really going to accomplish much. As Lord Ridley pointed out in the
Wall Street Journal on November 28, the NGO spokespeople attending at
Paris will scream like banshees of imminent disaster, for fear of having
their budgets cut, despite contrary evidence and although it is now
clear that decarbonization is much more harmful to the world than
increased carbon emissions.

Alternate sources of energy, such as wind and solar, are hideously more
expensive and much less productive, a luxury no country can really
afford, and certainly not the poorer countries. But the conference will
be hamstrung. Countries will volunteer their own individual targets for
reduction of carbon emissions, called Intended Nationally Determined
Contributions, or INDC’s.

The INDC of China only predicts that such emissions will meet their peak
by 2030, while, for all his militancy, President Obama’s U.S. INDC will
be a reduction of between 26% and 28% in ten years, yet the outline of
hoped-for gains, which the Congress will not endorse, and for years
Obama will only see as a private citizen, only calls for half the volume
reduction of emissions necessary to meet his pledge. The American INDC
is a scam.

Even the Obama administration is demanding an involuntary international
verification mechanism (much more rigorous than what it settled for in
the rather more urgent matter of Iranian nuclear military development),
and the elimination of the so-called “firewall” of separate arrangements
for the developed and under-developed (or developing) countries. The
developing countries, led by China and India, refuse, unless they are
solemnly promised a $100 billion a year climate fund, as Obama
imprudently pledged at Copenhagen.

This remains completely out of the question and furnished the
justification in advance for the developing countries to fall short of
their INDC targets, which will provide the cover for the developed
countries to do the same. Everyone will solemnly announce ambitious
INDCs, but there will be no verification, ample excuse for
non-compliance for everyone and this charade will continue to the next
portentous and verbose conference.

What seems to have happened is that the international far left, having
been decisively routed with the collapse of the Soviet Union and of
international communism, has attached itself to the environmental
movement, usurped the leading positions in it from the bird-watching,
butterfly-collecting, and conservation organizations, and is carrying on
its anti-capitalist and anarchist crusade behind the cover of
eco-Armageddonism.

While this has been rather skillfully executed, many office-holders and
aspirants, including Mr. Obama, have used dire environmental scenarios
to distract their electorates from their own policy failures, much as
Arab powers have long diluted anger at despotic misgovernment by harping
on the red herring of Israel.

Some breathtaking wisdom from Uganda below. It probably makes sense to Greenies

The 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference was recently held in Paris, France.

Also known as COP21 alias CMP 11, it was attended by 196 state parties
and led to the Paris Agreement aimed at reducing the rate of climate
change (global temperatures). The agreement talks of reducing global
warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, self-review every five years and
promises of financial transfers from rich to poor countries.

Despite self-congratulation by states and the UN, the agreement is not
legally binding; the 13 days in Paris with per diem have now been added
to the 23 years wasted since the UN started crying foul about the global
climate crisis.

From the first such conference in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the root cause
of the crisis – a socio-economic model that treats life not as
harmonious relationships between humans and with all other creation but
as unlimited private appropriation and aimless consumption – is
deliberately dodged.

Lessening use of fossil fuels or emissions of greenhouse gases per se is
not enough to rescue planet Earth and human beings from the impending
catastrophe. It requires reduction of per capita energy exploitation and
general destabilization of the various natural systems and cycles.

The fashionable concepts ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ are even a
misnomer; the situation is outrageous natural destabilization.
Humankind has destabilized the natural foundation that helped it build
civilization – in quest for super profits and dominion – and any
simplistic sentimentalism will solve nothing.

The solution would require a big change in our worldview and lifestyle,
more so abandoning the ones promoted by the UN under grand projects like
Millennium Development Goals and Sustainable Development Goals, and
certain religious beliefs and practices that divide humankind rather
than unite it.

Like with earlier agreements on climate, the states (read politicians)
will renege on their promises and even forge statistics. No wonder many
scientists and social activists feel betrayed already.

In the absence of a legitimate global authority that can whip each
country or social grouping, trusting politicians who come to power
through national elections after wild materialistic promises and
protecting their domestic (economic and military) policies is a
daydream.

Politicians and their economic advisers will never care about the common
good for nature and other humans. The agreement doesn’t show any
pathway to achieving even the shady goal, as if mere signing of
aspiration leads to compliance.

The United Nations, as a club of states, cannot alone manage the problem
of climate change. The minimum effort would involve participation of
religious organisations, corporate institutions (directly rather than
acting through politicians) and civil/social movements so as to bring to
table all relevant issues.

There must be serious opposition to social monotonization (by promoting
diversity in ideas, beliefs, ideals, and lifestyle), anthropocentrism,
(the belief that only humankind is created in the image of God, that the
world purposely exists to be dominated by and serve humankind) and the
delusion of linearism (belief that we are ever on a continuity to higher
progress), among others.

Otherwise, it is going to remain the same business as usual until three
extra-human interventions take place: cumulative mass destruction as a
form of natural self-purification and throwing off an unbearable burden;
or a great sudden deluge, something like the biblical flood or collapse
of the tower of Babel. Second will be the multiplication of new breeds
of surprise leaders and individuals, the likes of Pope Francis,
President John Mafuguli, former president Jose Mujica and whistleblower
Edward Snowden.

Third, will be a spiritual revival around a global prophetic movement
without a spatially-localized nucleus and not requiring paternalistic
evangelization waves.

However, in the meantime, let the wise and concerned embark on social
(activist/solidarity) movements working across all strata and nations to
boost those already suffering the effects of nature destabilization,
and expose and sabotage various criminals and ignoramuses responsible
for the brewing catastrophe.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

23 December, 2015

Will global warming kill off our pine trees?

The modelling crap below claims it will but is most
implausible. Pine trees are very widely distributed -- from the
near-Arctic to the tropics. As I look down at the floor of the
room where I am writing this, I see polished floorboards made of
slash-pine, once super-abundant but now mostly cut out, in sub-tropical
Queensland where I live. That such a versatile and hardly genus
could be disturbed by a few degrees of climate change is absurd. The
distribution of species might alter a little but that's it.

They
have been around for at least 300 million years so they have survived
huge climate changes in the past -- so it is unlikely that any piddly
Warmist scenario will bother them. And note that some species --
such as the Bristlecone pine -- are amazingly hardy and survive in very
unpromising situations to this day.

UPDATE: Here's some info from the FAO on how pines fail to thrive in warm climates:

Tropical pine species play an especially important role in modern
plantation forestry. Several species, mostly originating from the
American or Asian tropics and subtropics are now widely
cultivated. Pines enjoy such great popularity because:the large number of species allow choice for widely varying environmental conditions;many thrive on a wide range of sites;many flourish in dry, nutrient-poor soils or degraded sites;the volume production of some species can be high to very high, even under unfavourable site conditions;being robust pioneer species, pines are well suited for reforestation
and for simple silviculture (monocultures and clear-felling);wood qualities that are otherwise in limited supplies in the tropics -
of uniform coniferous wood valued for production of lumber, chemical
pulp, paper, particleboard, etc

President Barack Obama has vetoed legislation to repeal Environmental
Protection Agency regulations on power plants that are a key part of the
administration’s global warming agenda.

Obama announced Sunday morning he would not be considering bills to
repeal the EPA’s power plant rules, meaning the bills are subject to a
“pocket veto.”

“The Clean Power Plan is a tremendously important step in the fight
against global climate change,” Obama said in a statement. “[T]he
resolution would overturn the Clean Power Plan, which is critical to
protecting against climate change and ensuring the health and well-being
of our nation, I cannot support it.”

Obama’s veto stops the last chance a Republican-controlled Congress has
this year of derailing EPA rules to limit carbon dioxide emissions from
power plants. Congress passed bills in November that would have repealed
these regulations under the Congressional Review Act.

“The president’s veto of legislation that would have halted his EPA’s
regulatory overreach ignores reality in favor of politics, and leaves
the legal system as the best remaining course for those of us who are
seeking to protect consumers and businesses, at least during the
remainder of this administration,” Karen Harbert, who heads up energy
policy at the Chamber of Commerce, said in a statement.

The Chamber has joined dozens of business and union groups challenging
the EPA’s power plant rules. Twenty-seven states have also sued the EPA,
arguing its CO2 regulations violate the Clean Air Act and infringe on
state powers to set their own energy policy.

“The EPA’s carbon regulations will irreversibly harm America’s power
sector and raise the costs for every business and every American that
uses electricity,” Harbert said. “These rules will negatively impact
every industry and damage the economy without any significant reduction
in global greenhouse gas emissions. We look forward to our day in
court.”

Obama’s veto will likely be welcomed by environmentalists, who along
with the administration, argue EPA rules are necessary to prove to the
world the U.S. is taking global warming seriously. Obama and his allies
say the U.S. needs to commit to emissions cuts if it wants other major
countries, like China, to also fight warming.

Obama got his wish earlier this month when nearly 200 countries approved
a United Nations treaty to cut global emissions levels, but the
agreement is not legally binding — an international strategy used by the
White House to keep any agreement from having to go before a
Republican-controlled Senate.

Republican lawmakers have vowed to derail Obama’s global warming agenda,
but the recent $1.1 trillion budget bill did little to keep the EPA
from regulating CO2 emissions or keep the president from funding the
U.N.’s Green Climate Fund.

The budget bill does, however, impose a little more oversight over EPA
and holds the agency’s budget to $8.1 billion — that’s lower than the
agency’s 2010 funding levels.

Global warming won’t raise global temperatures enough to be dangerous,
according to an analysis of satellite data released over the weekend by
University of Alabama scientists.

The analysis of satellite data stretches back 37 years and estimates
that the temperature increase will be only 1.15° Celsius over the
century. Keeping global warming below 2° Celsius by 2100 is the widely
accepted goal promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) and the United Nations COP 21 Paris summit. Such a low rate of
temperature increase would prevent what global warming alarmists say are
the most hazardous impacts of global warming.

The average temperature of Earth’s atmosphere has warmed just over four
tenths of a degree Celsius (almost three fourths of a degree Fahrenheit)
during the past 37 years, with the greatest warming over the Arctic
Ocean and Australia,” Dr. John Christy, director of the University of
Alabama’s Earth System Science Center who preformed the analysis, told
the global warming blog Watts Up With That. “That would put the average
global temperature change over 100 years well under the 2.0 C (3.6
degrees F) goal set recently at the climate change summit in Paris.”

Christy is best known for being the first person to successfully develop a satellite temperature record.

More evidence that most feminism is just a subset of Leftism, with the best interests of women just a front

Environmentalists are increasingly claiming that global warming is a
“women’s issue” and that the world needs “eco-feminism” as a path
forward.

“We know that the world’s poor feel the effects of climate change most
acutely, but it turns out there is an even more vulnerable subset to
that population: women” reads the article The Sierra Club tweeted
Monday.

The author worries about a “agricultural resource gap for women farmers”
and that global warming could increase the risk of sexual assault. The
author even notes that “women are too often portrayed only as victims of
climate change who must learn to adapt, rather than potential leaders
and decision-makers.”

Bernie Sanders: ‘I'm Running Because We Need to Address the Planetary Crisis of Climate Change’

In his opening statement at the third Democratic presidential debate
hosted by ABC News at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire on Saturday
night, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont said he is running because America
needs to address “the planetary crisis” caused by climate change.

Sanders also said he is running because “our economy is rigged” and the
campaign finance system is one where “billionaires are spending hundreds
of millionaires of dollars to buy candidates," and because he wants a
new foreign policy "that destroys ISIS, but...does not get us involved
in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East."

Here is Sen. Sanders' opening statement:

I am running for president of the United States because it is too late for establishment politics and establishment economics.

I'm running for president because our economy is rigged, because working
people are working longer hours for lower wages and almost all of new
wealth and income being created is going to the top one percent. I'm
running for president because I'm going to create an economy that works
for working families not just billionaires.
I'm running for president because we have a campaign finance system
which is corrupt, where billionaires are spending hundreds of
millionaires of dollars to buy candidates who will represent their
interests rather than the middle class and working families.

I'm running because we need to address the planetary crisis of climate
change and take on the fossil fuel industry and transform our energy
system away from fossil fuel to energy efficiency and sustainable
energy.

I'm running for president because I want a new foreign policy--one that
takes on Isis, one that destroys ISIS, but one that does not get us
involved in perpetual warfare in the quagmire of the Middle East but
rather works around a major coalition of wealthy and powerful nations
supporting Muslim troops on the ground. That's the kind of coalition we
need--and that's the kind of coalition I will put together.

Increasing amounts of water are being depleted from the world’s
aquifers, and scientists have estimated that a large portion of the
water ends up flowing into the oceans.

So much groundwater is being pumped from wells that researchers say it is contributing significantly to global sea-level rise.

Hydrologists Yoshihide Wada and Marc Bierkens have calculated estimates
of the amounts of groundwater depleted annually since 1900, and their
findings are striking. When plotted on a chart, their figures show
depletion occurring at an accelerating pace – which in turn is pushing
the levels of the oceans higher.

The quickening rate of global depletion adds an alarming dimension to
scientists' findings, based on satellite measurements, which reveal
widespread declines in aquifers around the world. And as that water
flows off the continents, it is adding to the problem of rising seas as
glaciers and ice sheets melt due to global warming.

“If we want to understand current sea-level rise, which we need to
understand to better predict future sea-level rise, we have to take
account of this groundwater contribution,” said Bierkens, a professor at
Utrecht University in the Netherlands who is also affiliated with the
institute Deltares.

Wada, a research scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space
Studies in New York, said the world’s demand for water has grown
significantly in the past 15 years as the global population has swelled.
More water is being used to produce food, and much of that water is
being pumped from aquifers.

Climate has also played a role in places like California, where drought
has led farmers to pump groundwater more heavily to make up for the lack
of surface water.

As water is pumped from wells, some of it is taken up by crops or piped
to cities. Some evaporates and ends up in the clouds. In places, some of
the water soaks back into the ground and replenishes aquifers. But
scientists have calculated that much of the groundwater winds up in
rivers and ultimately in the oceans.

Bierkens and Wada have estimated that in 1960, the amounts of
groundwater depleted each year contributed between 0.09 and 0.27
millimeters to sea-level rise. By 1990, that had grown to 0.25-0.54
millimeters per year. And in 2014, they estimated groundwater depletion
was causing between 0.41 millimeters and 0.89 millimeters of sea-level
rise each year.

Researcher have produced varying estimates, with groundwater depletion
accounting for between 10 percent and 30 percent of annual sea-level
rise in recent years. Bierkens and Wada came down in the middle at
roughly 20 percent in a 2012 research paper.

That makes groundwater a small yet significant chunk of the projected
rise in the world's oceans, which threatens to swamp many low-lying
islands and inundate coastal cities in places from the United States to
China to Brazil.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has projected using a
range of scenarios that the seas could rise by between 1 foot and
slightly more than 3 feet by 2100. Other researchers have warned that
the oceans could rise faster.

Because groundwater pumping isn't well monitored or measured in most
places, scientific estimates of depletion are calculated based on
limited available data. That includes recorded declines in groundwater
levels when that information is available. In many places, though,
measurements of changes in water levels aren't publicly shared or are
only partially released, complicating the work of researchers.

In a 2011 study, Leonard Konikow of the U.S. Geological Survey
calculated that groundwater depletion accounted for about 6 percent of
sea-level rise during the 20th century. But he estimated that share grew
to 13 percent between 2000 and 2008.

Konikow said even though the rate of sea-level rise has increased, the
rate at which the world’s aquifers are being depleted "has increased
proportionately more.”

Wada said more studies of this groundwater contribution will be vital in planning mitigation measures to adapt to rising seas.

The trends also point to a need to increase the efficiency of irrigation
and take other steps to lessen overpumping, Bierkens said.

Groundwater has been called a "hidden resource" because in many areas
people have long been largely oblivious as aquifers have receded. But
Bierkens said that doesn't lessen the urgency of doing something about
the world's growing depletion problem.

“Per person on this Earth, we should try to decrease water demand,”
Bierkens said Thursday in an interview by Skype from San Francisco,
where he and Wada were attending a meeting of the American Geophysical
Union.

Bierkens likened overpumping to living on borrowed money.

“You’re basically depleting your savings to feed yourself, and that is
actually not a good idea,” Bierkens said. “Everybody who runs a
household knows that this is not sustainable in the end.”

In a 2014 article in the journal Nature Geoscience, Wada and other
scientists analyzed several strategies for lessening “water stress”
around the world in the coming decades. The strategies ranged from
moving toward more efficient irrigation systems and improving crop
yields to increasing the amounts of water stored in reservoirs and
building more desalination plants.

They concluded that with a variety of strategies, it would be possible
to hold steady the number of people living in water-stressed areas – now
about one-third of the world’s population – or even reduce that number.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

22 December, 2015

Batteries And Bulldust: Why ‘Living Off The Grid’ Is Not As Green As You Think

The arrival in Australia of the Tesla "Powerwall" storage battery has
produced lots of erections among Australian Greenies. They see it
as the longed-for solution to the intermittent nature of wind and solar
power. The article below however points out that such systems do
not add up as a replacement for reticulated electricity. The
author offers nuclear power as the best replacement for hydrocarbon
energy sources.

As you could probably guess from the angry tone
of it, the article appeared in a far-Left publication, "New
Matilda". It is however perfectly rational and numerate in its
critique of the batteries. There have always been some
Green/Leftists who like nukes. The Left in fact hailed nuclear
power when it was first rolled out in the '50s. It was "new" so
they liked it.

This is not the first pro-nuke article to appear
in "New Matilda". Editor Chris Graham is evidently balanced in his
thinking on some occasions. He even published a critique of
extreme feminism recently. But he did have to publish a Greenie reply to
the article below which I don't think is worth linking to.

By Geoff Russell

You can bet that a newsreader who pronounces film as ‘fill-em’ will
receive a flood of complaints. Similarly, spelling mistakes in the
written word will be pounced upon by the eagle-eyed readers with howls
of protest and claims of declining standards and the impending end of
civilisation.

But when people screw up with numbers, there’s a stunned silence. Our
innovation hungry Prime Minister recently announced $48m to combat
falling maths science standards, but it isn’t just children that need
help with numbers.

Take, for example, the Climate Council’s Tim Flannery and SBS journalist
Emma Hannigan in a recent news report about household battery
technologies. Flannery responded to Hannigan’s statement that sales of
battery systems were predicted to be 50,000 per year for the next decade
by saying “… when you get to that point, you won’t need coal fired
power systems any more”.

Get any 10-year-old (with a phone) to do the maths. 50,000 x 10 is half a million batteries. And how many households do we have?

Maths won’t help you here, you need data. Google it… number of households in Australia. It’s about 9 million.

So will half a million batteries make a dent in our electricity
emissions? A tad useless would be an appropriate technical estimate, but
since household electricity is only about a quarter of electricity,
it’s really a quarter of a tad useless.

Put simply, half a million batteries, at around $7,150 dollars each
(current price) is an incredibly stupid way to spend $35 billion
dollars. For comparison, the United Arab Emirates bought 4 x 1.4
gigawatt South Korean nuclear plants for $20 billion (US) and they’ll
all be running by 2020.

That would generate enough electricity to charge half a million 7kw
Tesla batteries 126,000 times in a decade; if they could handle it. They
are only rated to handle 5,000 charge discharge cycles.

But cost isn’t the biggest reason for not using big batteries in houses.
Let’s consider the situation in Germany, mainly because the data comes
easily to hand and because they’ve just wasted 15 years mucking around
with renewables at great cost, but with trivial impact.

They expect to take 50 years to do what France did in 15 with nuclear
power. Consider the following chart of German electricity use in January
2015.

Can you see the days with very little wind and sun? There’s one run of
five in a row starting on the 19th of January. In the absence of their
fossil fuel and nuclear plants, how much battery storage would the
Germans need to cover this kind of run?

They’ve just signed the COP21 agreement that should stop them expanding
their logging of forests for electricity; in fact I’d argue that Article
5 requires them to reduce it.

To make the maths trivial, lets assume they only need to supply 50
gigawatts of power for five days. That’s 5 x 24 = 120 hours. Do the sums
and you’ll see that the batteries will need to supply 6,000
gigawatt-hours of energy (120 x 50). A gigawatt is a ‘1’ with 9 zeros.
So, how many fully charged Tesla 7 kilowatt-hour Powerwalls would you
need to supply this? All those zeros make what is a trivial calculation
look complex: 6,000,000,000,000 divided by 7,000 is 857,142,857.

That’s 857 million batteries at a current cost of … $6.1 trillion dollars.

In the real world, many industries need their electricity in a
particular form, but the numbers at least give us a feel for the scale
of the problem.

But, as I said, cost isn’t the biggest reason people shouldn’t do this.

Consider the much-vaunted Tesla gigafactory? When it’s finished in 2020,
it will produce batteries for half a million vehicles a year. That’s
impressive and useful, but how many such giga factories will it take to
supply batteries for those five days of German power?

Each year the giga factory can produce 35 gigawatt hours of battery
storage. So how many years of production will it take to supply 6,000
gigawatt hours worth of batteries… 6,000,000,000,000/35,000,000,000…
roughly 171 years; assuming Germany is the only customer.

You can do such calculations without all those zeros by using the Exp button on your phone calculator App.

But of course, real engineers wouldn’t use Tesla Powerwalls for such a
purpose, they’d go for something much cheaper like pumped hydro. This is
where you pump water from a low place to a high place when you have
cheap electricity and then let it fall back down through a turbine to
generate electricity at some later time.

It’s great when the geography is suitable and you don’t mind trashing some high mountain valley.

But surely batteries will get cheaper? Agreed. The Climate Council has
just published a modest battery report. They make a general claim that
the cost of battery storage should fall to $200 per kilowatt hour by
2020.

If that comes to pass, the Germans could provide for a run of 5 cold
still days using an as yet undeveloped technology at a projected cost of
just $1.2 trillion. That makes me feel much better!

So we probably can’t afford them, and it will be incredibly tough to
build enough of them, but there’s still another far more important
reason that using big batteries in houses, or for general grid backup,
is dumb enough that it should be made illegal where there is no actual
need.

Has the penny dropped yet? Here’s a hint. The world sells 70 million
cars a year and the Tesla giga factor will make half a million car-sized
batteries a year when it’s finished in 2020.

It should be obvious now… we will desperately need good, big batteries for electric vehicles.

Batteries and hydrogen fuel look to be our only choices for vehicles. So
we shouldn’t be wasting valuable battery production resources to make
batteries for houses because some puddle shallow thinkers reckon it’s
cool to live off-grid.

We know how to cleanly and efficiently power houses; you build nuclear
power plants and hook them into a grid. In developing countries, there
is a pressing need for grids and that will be a huge challenge. Wasting
valuable battery production capacity on powering houses will make
everything that much harder.

The whole batteries-in-houses idiocy is part of what is inevitable when
rich countries transfer spending decisions from Governments to
individuals via low taxation rates and small government; or more
accurately, incompetent Government; Governments who no longer have the
skills and vision to pursue major projects in the national interest, let
alone the international interest.

Traditionally, when Governments spent money, there was at least a
fighting chance that a competent bureaucracy would act rationally and in
the public interest.

But when it’s up to individuals, particularly rich, self-centered
individuals who can’t think quantitatively, then they will buy Tesla
batteries and Tesla will happily supply them.

If Tesla boss Elon Musk had even half the environmental concern he professes, then he wouldn’t make the bloody things.

WHO SAYS nothing ever gets accomplished in Washington? When the House of
Representatives voted this fall to lift the nation's 40-year ban on
exporting crude oil produced in the United States, the measure seemed
doomed in the face of White House opposition. But on Wednesday,
congressional leaders settled on a massive spending and tax package,
and, wonder of wonders, the resumption of oil exports made the final
cut. Both House and Senate were expected to pass the legislation
promptly (albeit grudgingly); President Obama has said he'll sign it.

Like a lot of dubious ideas from the Nixon era — wage and price
controls, the abandonment of the gold standard, the political misuse of
the IRS — the oil export ban was a piece of folly that only grew worse
with time. Imposed in the wake of the 1973 Arab oil embargo, it was one
of several responses aimed at softening the blow of the oil shock on the
US economy. The most notorious of those responses, gasoline price
controls and rationing, were such obvious failures that they soon
collapsed amid long lines and shortages at filling stations.

But the law barring US oil exports persisted. Policymakers imagined that
forbidding producers to sell crude oil to foreign customers would
enhance American energy by conserving domestic reserves and thus make
the nation less reliant on imported energy. That's not what happened. US
crude-oil production began to dwindle, shrinking from 10 million
barrels per day in the early 1970s to only half as much by 2008. Far
from depending less on imported petroleum, Americans required steadily
more of it. When Nixon was in the White House, the nation imported 6
million barrels of petroleum daily; 30 years later, the daily intake of
foreign oil had surpassed 13 million barrels.

In effect, America had imposed punitive sanctions on its own energy
industry, the only significant oil-drilling country to so hobble its
producers. After a while the export ban no longer seemed to matter.
Production had fallen so far that there wasn't much crude oil to export
anyway.

But then came the shale-oil revolution and the miraculous boom unleashed
by fracking and horizontal drilling. Suddenly the United States was an
oil-producing superpower again, with crude oil being pumped from the
ground at a daily rate of almost 10 million barrels, a level not seen
since 1970. In the space of a few short years, the United States had
unexpectedly become the world's foremost oil producer. Yet thanks to an
export ban that had never made sense, much of that oil had nowhere to
go, and piled up in storage tanks. As of last week, US crude-oil
inventories were at 490 million barrels, an 80-year high.

In a world thirstier for oil than ever, the absurdity of the US export
ban at last became impossible to deny. Voices from across the political
spectrum — elected Republicans and Democrats, as well as researchers at
Columbia University, the Brookings Institution, the Government
Accountability Office, the Aspen Institute, and Resources for the Future
— joined in calling for exports to be revived. The realization had
finally taken hold that, in a global energy market, to hobble American
producers is to hobble American consumers, and the best way to enhance
US energy security is to free US energy to compete in the market.

So goodbye to the oil-export ban. And good riddance to a policy that
never worked as its advocates predicted. But let's not stop there. What
we really should be jettisoning is the notion that the right to buy and
sell across borders is a privilege that governments bestow or withhold
as they see fit, instead of a human right — a natural liberty — that
governments must not infringe except in extreme and very limited
circumstances.

The freedom to trade — to engage in mutual,voluntary, and honest
commerce — is as fundamental a human right as freedom of religion, or
the freedom to work and own property.

Human beings, by virtue of being human, are entitled to worship as they
choose, to own property, to emigrate from their country, and to form
peaceable associations. Those are fundamental rights, not dependent on
the government's political preferences or utilitarian considerations.
The freedom to engage in mutual and honest commerce is just as
fundamental, and it should be just as immaterial whether lawmakers
approve of the bargain struck between seller and buyer. Jones shouldn't
have to lobby public officials for the right to hire Smith or teach
Smith or pray with Smith, or seek Smith's opinion. Nor should he have to
win government approval for the right to sell his goods and services to
Smith. Not even if Smith lives in another neighborhood, or another
state, or another country.

Edmund Burke, the great Irish statesman and philosopher of liberty,
wrote in 1795: "Free trade is not based on utility but on justice." Your
property and labor are your own, and so is your freedom to trade them
with a willing partner. When legislators and regulators impose biased or
inequitable barriers to free trade, they violate a universal human
right. That is why they should be opposed by Democrats, Republicans, and
independents alike.

Punitive tariffs or export bans, arbitrary quotas or domestic-content
restrictions — all such impediments to peaceful commerce are
transgressions against the rightful autonomy of free human beings.
Prohibiting Americans who pump oil from selling that oil abroad was
always economically short-sighted and counterproductive. But worse than
that, it was immoral. The right to trade is as indispensable as the
right to work. When politicians usurp that right, they render all of us
less free.

President Obama talks a lot about the scientific method. On climate
change, he has often invoked the idea of a great divide between those on
the progressive left, such as himself, who believe in “settled science”
and thus a looming man-caused climatological disaster, and those,
presumably on the Neanderthal Right, who are slaves to superstition,
ideology, prejudice, and self-interest—and thus deny that the planet is
rapidly warming due to inordinate human-induced releases of excessive
carbon.

Obama’s view of science is reductionist. It relies on count-em-up
numbers: if more university professors (not known to be an especially
independent or courageous cohort) believe in dangerous man-caused
climate change than doubt it or its seriousness, and if climate change
fits a larger progressive agenda, then it becomes factual.

Would we assume thereby that Newton, Galileo, and Darwin were all
exemplars of groupthink, and worked through consensus and collegiality,
especially with the support of status-quo institutions and universities,
in advancing majority-held theories?

When Obama signed legislation in his first weeks in office enabling
human stem cell research, he pontificated that his act was about
ensuring “that scientific data is never distorted or concealed to serve a
political agenda and that we make scientific decisions based on facts,
not ideology.” Aside from the fact that there were and are methodologies
of harvesting stem cells without resort to embryonic protocols, the
president’s entire approach to science, data, and the inductive method
is to privilege ideology and subordinate facts.

In short, Obama is the most anti-science, anti-factual president in modern memory.

The president has warned the nation, usually on the most inappropriate
and untimely occasions, of the American tendency to succumb to
Islamophobia. But to support such an assumed pathology, the president
adduced no evidence that Americans are more likely to target Muslims
than other groups.

If we were to rely on “scientific” research, there is statistical
evidence that in general hate crimes in the U.S. are rare, and that in
particular they tend to focus on Jews. The most recent survey (2014) of
the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program shows 58% of hate crimes were
directed at Jews, while just 16% were against Muslims. Thus, if the
president felt that there was a real danger of American citizens or
residents harming others due to their religions, then obviously he would
warn us not to attack Jews, who suffer more hate crimes than all other
religious groups combined.

As a student of science, Obama should incorporate such findings in his
pop editorializing and not, for example, sloppily characterize the
deliberate sorting and murdering of four Jews in a Paris delicatessen as
if it were a random attack on “a bunch of folks” (e.g., “violent,
vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a
deli in Paris”).

If Obama really wished to address hate crimes in more precise scientific
fashion, he would ask for data concerning not just the most likely
group to suffer such attacks, but the most likely group statistically to
commit them. But then again there is an anti-scientific resistance to
investigating the matter further, given the likely results that would
suggest an unwelcome reality.

The president also insists that the government in reaction to the San
Bernardino terrorist attacks must now rush to make it illegal for anyone
on the no-fly lists to buy guns. Is there any scientific evidence that
such a move would have much effect in preventing or abating terrorism?
Or is such a call based on folklore and ideologically driven
superstition?

Over 800,000 are on the terrorist watch list, and about 64,000 of them
are additionally on the no-fly list. Aside from the facts that both
lists grow and do not seem to shrink, and that reasons are not always
provided for adding names to the lists, there is no evidence that those
included in the past on the no-fly list so far have been the
perpetrators of post-9/11 terrorist attacks. Banning guns to those on a
no-fly list may in theory be wise, but there is no scientific evidence
to suggest that it would be. If one were to consult other various lists
of the major terrorist operations in the U.S. since 9/11—and they range
in number from 50-60 depending on the criteria used—the vast majority
were committed by those who self-identified as acting on behalf of
Islam.

In rejecting the Keystone pipeline, the president ignored the scientific
conclusions of his own State Department’s body of expert consultants
who found no major negative impact to the climate by building the
pipeline. In fact, statistically it is likely far less deleterious to
the environment to ship oil-sand products by pipeline through the United
States than to transport it by existing rail and truck. The Keystone
cancellation was emblematic of making scientific decisions based on
ideology, not facts.

NASA, as its name implies, by all accounts is a scientific government
agency devoted to the exploration of the upper atmosphere and space. Its
mission is not, as its Director Charles Bolden understood his mandate
from President Obama, a sociological one: “And third, and perhaps
foremost, (emphasis added) he wanted me to find a way to reach out to
the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to
help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math
and engineering.” Once the U.S. again has its own rockets, such outreach
may be a nice thing to do. But “feel good” is not the “foremost”
mission of that government scientific organization. Envision the next
present promising to use NASA to ensure that Christian nations “feel
good” about past Christian “contributions to science, math, and
engineering.” Almost instantaneously we would hear—and rightly
so—charges leveled against an anti-science president subverting for
ideological purposes and a “political agenda” an historic government
scientific enterprise.

Most climatologists do not connect the California drought with global
warming. To the degree that we can ascertain a cause, given the paucity
of weather-related data in California dating much before 1850,
scientists point to the El Niño effect. Slight changes in east-central
Pacific Ocean temperatures have historically affected the formation and
trajectories of West Coast storms. To the degree temperature per se is
the culprit, our present drought is largely a result of oceanic
temperatures being too cool—in other words, too little of an El Niño
effect.

Yet Obama flew into the Central Valley of California, Ground Zero of the
drought, pronounced climate change the culprit, promised federal monies
for that purpose, and flew out. Aside from politicizing a natural
disaster for contemporary political advantage, anti-science also plays a
role in the drought. Activists and government officials, state and
federal, did not calibrate rising state population with increased needs
for water storage and transfers.

Instead, in an ideological and anti-science frenzy, they suspended
completing the California Water Project and Central Valley Project
infrastructure, and embraced romantic but unproven theories about
diverting contracted irrigation water to reintroduce salmon to the San
Joaquin River and to restore delta smelt populations to assumed normal
levels. Both anti-scientific efforts failed to increase those
populations, but only after the wastage of several million acre-feet of
precious water. Releasing scarce storage water in a drought—contrary to
the initial aims of the Central Valley and California Water Projects of
flood control, irrigation, recreation, and power generation—on the
theory of altering fish populations is about as anti-scientific and
anti-human as one can get.

If one were to characterize the Obama administration approach to the
natural world, it is precisely an historical effort to privilege
ideology over facts. In matters of gun control, Obama ignores how,
where, and why most Americans are killed by guns because the facts do
not fit a preconceived narrative. In matters of the Affordable Care Act,
the administration made unscientific claims about affordability,
budgetary consequences, coverage, and access that were quickly proven
contrary to available evidence.

In reaction to the Benghazi killings, the Obama team advanced a
narrative about a right-wing video maker prompting such “spontaneous”
violence that contradicted eyewitness accounts, forensic evidence, and
the social media testimonies of the attackers and the reports of the
attacked. Then there is the matter of racial violence such as Michael
Brown’s death in Ferguson. The president evoked it as an example of
police excess, even though his own Justice Department found no
culpability on the part of the officer in question and the narrative of
an innocent victim crying out "hands up, don’t shoot" to be an entire
fabrication. For political and ideological purposes, the Obama Justice
Department supports flawed studies theorizing that one in four females
on campus will be a victim of sexual violence during her college years—a
theory debunked by facts as often as it is resurrected for its
electoral utility.

Obama does not believe in science because science is blind. In today’s
political climate, disinterested inquiry is a mortal sin. We live in an
age in which aims that are declared socially just require any means
necessary to achieve them—even if that ensures a denial of the
scientific method and facts themselves.

The fossil fuel divestment movement, currently active on more than one
thousand college and university campuses, is an attack on freedom of
inquiry and responsible social advocacy in American higher education.

This report traces the origins of the movement, examines in detail its
motives and methods, and presents an objective record of its successes
and failures.

The fossil fuel divestment movement emerged from a single campaign at
Swarthmore College in fall 2010 and has grown into an international
movement orchestrated by Bill McKibben’s activist group 350.org. Its
success in casting itself as this generation’s defining cause has made
it a powerful influence on the opinions
of today’s youth.

The fossil fuel divestment campaign has reinvented itself several times.
At Swarthmore in 2010 and 2011, the movement presented itself as a
solidarity campaign with “frontlines” communities resisting coal
extraction. Since Bill McKibben brought the campaign to national
prominence, it has evolved into a moral crusade against global warming,
and then an Occupy Wall Street-style revolt against privileged
power-holders. The movement is now in the midst of a fourth
transformation, this time into a financial advisor that foresees
investment risks in coal, oil, and gas companies.

The movement’s abiding purpose has been to pressure governments to favor
wind, solar, and hydro power, and to make colleges and universities
pressure cookers of sustainability. The divestment movement is itself a
spin-off from the larger campus sustainability movement. Many students
encountered the ideas that form the premises of the divestment movement
in sustainability classes and sustainability activities sponsored by
their colleges.

At least two campaigns (at De Anza College and at California State
University, Chico) took root when professors gave college credit to
students who worked on a fossil fuel divestment campaign. Another
campaign, at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, started after the
university assigned every freshman a summer reading of "Eaarth" by Bill
McKibben, and invited McKibben to speak on campus.

As this report goes to press, activists have named this fall “escalation
season,” a period running from October 1 until December 12, the day
after the UN Climate Summit in Paris concludes. Every semester is now
“escalation season,” part of a throbbing cycle of contrived, organized
angst. Spring 2016 “escalation” is already scheduled to revive in April,
when the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network plans to hold 20
college sit-ins. In spring 2015, 11 colleges and universities saw
sit-ins for divestment.

The National Association of Scholars has observed and critiqued the
campus sustainability movement over the last seven years, and followed
the fossil fuel divestment movement since its emergence at Swarthmore
five years ago. We offer the most thorough encyclopedia of collegiate
fossil fuel divestment activism
published to date.

THE FINDINGS

The fossil fuel divestment campaign is:

1. Growing but overstated: The number of fossil fuel divestment
campaigns has skyrocketed from 1 in 2010 to more than a thousand,
according to Go Fossil Free. Many are run by small numbers of full-time
organizers.

2. College-born but professionally managed: Both the idea of fossil fuel
divestment and the main organization supporting it (350.org) grew out
of college student campaigns at Swarthmore College and Middlebury
College respectively. Students remain the face of the movement, and at
least one student-run organization, the Fossil Fuel Divestment Students
Network, supports divestment campaigns. But much of the organizational
and intellectual framework comes from professional environmental
activists and environmentalist organizations that train college
students.

3. Modeled after the Arab Spring: Activists say their cause is cut from
the same cloth as the Middle Eastern push for democracy, because
trustees who oppose divestment are oligarchs who ignore pro-divestment
students’ voices.

4. Self-consciously impotent against fossil fuel companies:
Advocates of divestment, including Bill McKibben, acknowledge that divestment
will not decrease the share prices of fossil fuel companies or
appreciably shrink their profits and access to capital.

5. A game of bluff: Few divestments are complete. Only 34 percent of
“divested” colleges and universities have fully shed their fossil fuel
investments. Four have sold no investments at all since their divestment
decisions: Humboldt State University, Syracuse University, Oxford
University, and the University of Otago Foundation Trust (New Zealand).
We label these “DINOs”—divestments in name only.

6. Elitist: The divestment movement is most fervent at wealthy, elite colleges and universities, though it has had little
success persuading administrators there.

In his daring masterpiece, Alex Epstein exposes modern environmentalists
for what they really are: pro-nature and human-hating. For them, the
slightest modification of Mother Nature’s virgin work is a crime worse
than the Holocaust. With COP 21 now fully operational we are hearing
those anti-human environmentalists more than ever.

And they spare no one when they spit their venom. David Suzuki, Canada’s
Green Pope, recently compared the defense of the oil industry to the
defense of slavery. You read that right. Defending forced labor is akin
to wanting to keep the cheapest, most reliable source of energy ever
mastered as of now.

Of course, he only wants you to be “free” of this evil form of energy.
He wants to keep traveling in order to spread his green gospel while you
use a horse and bugey. He wants others to have fewer children while
having 10 children and grand-children. And he wants scientists that
agree with him to speak freely while imprisoning those who dare having
different views.

He is not the only one with this mindset.

Only a few weeks ago many public university professors came forward and
asked the federal government to prosecute “deniers” using the RICO Act –
originally created to prosecute the mafia. Like any group, these
professors know that if their scam is exposed they will lose everything.
Therefore they need to use every means possible to keep earning their
income. This seems to include hiding inconvenient facts.

Still about politics, there are elected representatives – I will let you
guess their color – that want to bar one of the only profitable uses of
public lands in honor of Mother Nature. Sens. Patrick Leahy and Bernie
Sanders, of Vermont, and Sen. Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, introduced a bill
that would ban any new fossil fuel exploitation on federal lands
(including water) in order to stop carbon “pollution” … from greening
the Earth.

Of course, as a “democratic” socialist Sanders couldn’t help but
exposing his Koch derangement syndrome by blaming the hard-working
entrepreneurs for wanting to enrich themselves while benefiting society.
Strangely enough, he doesn’t speak out about against billionaire George
Soros.

This liberal “philanthropist” has recently bought off two major coal
businesses who were about to go bankrupt thanks to President Barack
Obama’s war on coal, among others. Sanders is also silent towards
another billionaire, Tom Steyer. Not only did Steyer spend an insane
amount of money to influence the 2014 elections, but the coal projects
he once invested in will emit carbon “pollution” for decades to come.

Finally Sanders seems to be rather silent on the dire consequences of
“renewable” energy. He wants more hybrid cars, therefore encouraging a
tremendous amount of pollution in China from rare earth mining. He also
wants more wind energy, therefore encouraging the slaughter of millions
of birds.

In short, the anti-human environmentalists are actually the ones who
destroy the planet the most. They promote sources of energy that are
highly inefficient, highly polluting and that would be unaffordable
without subsidies. And that’s exactly why they promote these energies.
That way, populations will sharply decline and lead to the promised
Green Ecotopia.

Let’s look at a real-life example of climate aid in eastern India — not
one involving governments but the international environmental group
Greenpeace. On its website Dharnai Live, we see smiling people and
solar-panel-covered roofs, and we’re told that after “30 years of
darkness” green energy came to the rescue.

But here’s what really happened: last year, under the slogan “Energy
access simplified”, Greenpeace supplied Dharnai with a solar-powered
micro-grid — not connected to India’s central grid. Greenpeace writes
that “Dharnai refused to give into the trap of the fossil fuel
industry”.

That is a somewhat loose paraphrasing of what the people who lived there wanted for themselves.

Back in 2010, Dharnai’s inhabitants had collected $US680 in the hope of
buying their way into the power grid, which in most of India is supplied
by coal-fired power plants. Four years later, still with no
electricity, Greenpeace swooped to the rescue with a solar system.

The day the electricity was turned on, the batteries were drained of power within a few hours.

A boy from Dharnai remembers wanting to do his homework early in the
morning before leaving to work in the fields, but there wasn’t enough
power for the family’s one lamp.

Today, power from the solar system costs up to three times as much as
power from the central power grid, and it also requires the use of
energy-efficient light bulbs, that cost 66 times more than normal light
bulbs.

But fortunately for the people of Dharnai — if not for the Greenpeace
narrative — the town today is connected to the central power grid. You
see, Greenpeace invited the state chief minister to the inauguration of
the solar system so he could meet the grateful inhabitants.

When he showed up, he was met by a large crowd of people, with signs and
songs demanding “real electricity” (the kind you can use to run the
stove and the refrigerator) and not “fake electricity” (meaning solar
energy).

A week later, a 100kWh transformer was installed, and Dharnai received modern electricity.

Today, two-thirds of the original recipient households have opted out of
the solar-panel scheme, and the rest use it primarily as a backup when
the central power grid fails.

This is a part of the story you won’t hear from Greenpeace — but it
shows why it’s necessary to question when well-meaning people tell us
that dishing out solar panels is a good way to spend development money.

And it points to a broader problem with the state of green energy.
Here in Paris, there are many well-meaning people who argue that we need
strong carbon cuts and green-energy production subsidies now and for
many years to come, to get the world to move towards tackling climate
change.

But at the same time, these same people argue that solar and wind is
already competitive and effective, or that this moment is just around
the corner. The strange thing is that those two arguments are
incompatible.

We are often told that green energy is competitive in developing
countries, and particularly Africa. Green energy, especially wind, can
indeed help African countries, for example, to get electricity to
remote, rural areas.

But that is only a small part of the big picture. As we saw in Dharnai,
the grid will do by far the most good for the most people. According to a
2011 World Bank study, renewable energy “will be the lowest cost option
for a minority of households in Africa, even when likely cost
reductions over the next 20 years are considered”.

Popular solar lights cost almost $US2 per kilowatt hour. Using hydro,
gas and oil, the grid cost for the main population centres in Ethiopia,
Ghana, and Kenya will likely be US16c to US25c a kilowatt hour. In South
Africa, where coal powers 90 per cent of electricity, the cost is just
US9c a kilowatt hour.

Green energy costs $US168bn in subsidies right now each year, and by 2040 we’ll be paying even more at $US206bn a year.

However, it is also interesting — and surprising to many — to note that
even with these massive subsidies and green policies, doing everything
governments are now promising, we’ll get just 2.4 per cent of our energy
from green sources in 2040, according to the International Energy
Agency.

You really have to put on a pair of green-tinted spectacles to see a
world in which renewable energy is about to become competitive or
already is.

It is for that reason that the Paris Treaty will cost a fortune
and do very little. Until there is a breakthrough that makes green
energy competitive on its own merits, massive carbon cuts are expensive
and extremely unlikely to happen.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

21 December, 2015

Crocodile baloney

The Warmists never stop. Always a new scare. This time
it's crocs that are going to eat you as a result of global
warming. Why? Because global warming will drive them towards
the cooller waters of Southern Australia. Just one problem:
Crocs are reptiles and they LIKE warmth. The warmer they are, the more
active they are. So where are they generally found? In
TROPICAL Australia -- around Cape York Peninsula and the Top End.
It's the HOTTEST part of Australia that they like. They vote with
their feet to show the best habitat for themselves. No wonder those who
know crocodiles well in the wild dismiss the laboratory study reported
below

And I have done my usual trick of looking up the underlying academic journal article (Diving
in a warming world: the thermal sensitivity and plasticity of diving
performance in juvenile estuarine crocodiles (Crocodylus porosus)).
When I do that, I often find that the authors have concluded what they
wanted to conclude regardless of what their results show. And so
it seems here too. I note the following sentence in the Abstract:
"Maximal dive performances, however, were found to be thermally
insensitive across the temperature range of 28–35°C". Come
again? 28–35°C is the temperature range they studied and the
central claim of the article is that crocs can't stay underwater for
long if the water is hot. Yet that sentence asserts the exact
opposite. I give up!

The little lady whose Ph.D. research
the article was based on -- Essie Rodgers -- would appear to have been
very poorly supervised

Essie

Saltwater crocodiles may be forced to migrate from the north of Australia to the southern states because of global warming

A University of Queensland study has found the man eaters may be
ill-equipped to adjust to rising water temperatures, prompting them to
migrate to cooler environments.

The researchers found the higher water temperatures hindered their
diving ability, putting the young crocs at risk from predators.

Professor Craig Franklin of the university's School of Biological
Sciences said they have found crocodiles are not hardwired to adapt to
water temperatures – unlike other cold blooded animals.

'It's likely that if the water is too hot, crocodiles might move to
cooler regions, or will seek refuge in deep, cool water pockets to
defend their dive times,' he said.

Lead author for the study, PhD student Essie Rodgers, said the study
showed increases in water temperatures severely shortened crocodiles
diving times.

A dubious statement below: "Species distribution in the environment
had remained relatively constant for around 300 million years before
humans began farming". Species go extinct all the time.
That's evolution. More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over
five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be
extinct

The impact of humans on the environment is often cast as a modern
problem due to pollution, habitat destruction and man-made climate
change.

But new research has shown that the activities of our species have been reshaping nature for more than 6,000 years.

In a study that examined the distribution patterns of species over the
past 307 million years, researchers have pinpointed a 'tipping point'
when mankind's activities began changing ecosystems.

They said increases in hunting as stone technology improved, the spread
of farming and the domestication of animals changed the world in
irreversible ways.

This heralded a new stage in global evolution of plants and animals as a force other than nature shaped how the world looked.

Kathleen Lyons, a palaeobiologist at the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, said species
distribution in the environment had remained relatively constant for
around 300 million years before humans began farming.

She said: 'This tells us that humans have been having a massive effect on the environment for a very long time.'

The researchers, whose work is published in the journal Nature,
evaluated changes in plant and animal organisation over the past 307
million years.

They quantified the co-occurrence of more than 359,000 different
fossilised and modern species from North America, Europe and Africa,
examining the possibility of two species occurring in a landscape at the
same time.

For example, elephants and giraffes often appear in the same landscape
as they prefer the same habitat while lions and zebra also occur
side-by-side as the predators prey on the herbivores.

The researchers found that for around 300 million years, it was more
common for species to occur together – or aggregate – on a landscape.

Through the Carboniferous period to the early Holocene epoch - 11,700
years ago - they calculate there was an average of 64 per cent of
species who occurred in these aggregated relationships.

However, around 6,000 years ago, this appears to have changed with just
37 per cent of species pairs having aggregated relationships.

Since then, they said, species have become more segregated - meaning
where you find one species, you are less likely to find another.

Dr Lyons told the Smithsonian Magazine this could have important implications for species alive today.

She said: 'We're living in a lot of areas where species used to overlap
their distributions. They don't overlap anymore because they can't get
through the areas where we're living now.

'It probably means species are more vulnerable to extinction because there are fewer connections between them.

'And because their geographic ranges are smaller, their abundances are almost certainly smaller.'

If rooftop solar is a dodo in sunny CA, where is it a good thing?
It's not dead yet in CA but Jerry Brown and his merry men have pulled
their support out from under it

California's aggressive push to increase renewable energy production
comes with a catch for people with solar panels on the roof: You don't
count.

If a home or business has a rooftop solar system, most of the wattage
isn't included in the ambitious requirement to generate half of the
state's electricity from renewable sources such as solar and wind by
2030, part of legislation signed in October by Gov. Jerry Brown.

That means rooftop solar owners are missing out on a potentially
lucrative subsidy that is paid to utilities and developers of big power
projects.

It also means that utility ratepayers could end up overpaying for clean
electricity to meet the state's benchmark because lawmakers, by
excluding rooftop solar, left out the source of more than a third of the
state's solar power.

Owners of rooftop solar systems and their advocates aren't happy about the policy.

"Ratepayers essentially subsidize utility companies," said Bernadette
Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar Energy Industries
Assn. "We all get taken to the bank" if utilities are spending to reach
a 50% clean-energy mandate that could be attained faster and cheaper
with the help of roof panels.

For homeowners such as Carrie McCandless, the state's policy on rooftop solar came as a surprise.

"I'm stunned," said McCandless, a Livermore, Calif., resident who wanted
to help improve the environment because her daughter suffers from
severe asthma.

Her solar panels fit the bill, producing clean energy for her family.
And they gave her a sense of pride, she said, in helping the state reach
its energy targets — or so she thought.

"We all think we're making a difference and contributing," McCandless said. "I'm just so angry."

The rooftop solar industry and consumer advocates say opposition to
including rooftop solar in California's renewable energy mandate came
from large developers that feared competition for subsidies as well as
unions that were upset because rooftop solar installers typically aren't
members.

"They excluded it because the unions and corporate entities didn't want
it," said Jamie Court, president of the advocacy group Consumer
Watchdog.

Twenty-one states and the District of Columbia include rooftop solar
panels in their mandates for clean energy, with varying benefits for
participants.

Among the states with clean-energy mandates, the solar industry says,
California is alone in its approach of counting mainly commercial
installations that sell to utilities — Southern California Edison, San
Diego Gas & Electric and Pacific Gas & Electric — or facilities
that the utilities own themselves.

History, on the “right side” of which Barack Obama endeavors to keep us,
has a sense of whimsy. Proof of which is something happening this week:
Britain’s last deep-pit coal mine is closing, a small event pertinent
to an enormous event, the Industrial Revolution, which was ignited by
British coal.

The mine closure should not, however, occasion cartwheels by the
climate’s saviors, fresh from their Paris achievement. The mine is
primarily a casualty of declining coal prices, a result of burgeoning
world energy supplies. Thanks largely to the developing world, demand
for coal is expected to increase for at least another quarter-century.

The mine is closing immediately after the planet’s latest “turning
point” — the 21st U.N. climate change conference since 1995, each
heralded as a “turning point.” The climate conference, like God in
Genesis, looked upon its work and found it very good. It did so in spite
of, or perhaps because of, this fact: Any agreement about anything
involving nearly 200 nations will necessarily be primarily aspirational,
exhorting voluntary compliance with inconsequential expectations — to
“report” on this and “monitor” that. A single word change that brought
the agreement to fruition: it replaced a command (nations “shall” do so
and so) with an entreaty (nations “should” do so and so).

Secretary of State John Kerry knew that any agreement requiring U.S.
expenditures and restrictions on wealth creation would founder on the
reef of representative government. He remembers why Bill Clinton
flinched from seeking Senate ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol:
The Senate voted 95-0 for a resolution disapproving the Protocol’s
principles, with Massachusetts Sen. Kerry among the 95.

Eighteen years later, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of
whose invaluable functions is to be a wet blanket about moveable feasts
such as the Paris conference, says: “Before [the president’s]
international partners pop the champagne, they should remember that this
is an unattainable deal based on a [U.S.] domestic energy plan that is
likely illegal, that half the states have sued to halt, and that
Congress has already voted to reject.”

The Paris agreement probably occasions slight excitement among the
planet’s billion people who lack electricity, and the hundreds of
millions in need of potable water. Historians, write Walter Russell Mead
and Jamie Horgan of The American Interest, are likely to say that the
Paris agreement ended climate change the way the 1928 Kellogg-Briand
Treaty ended war. But as the ink dries on the Paris gesture of
right-mindedness, let us praise the solar energy source most responsible
for the surge of human betterment that began with the harnessing of
fossil fuels around 1800.

The source is, of course, coal, a still abundant and indispensable form
in which the sun’s energy has been captured from carbon-based life. Matt
Ridley, a member of a British coal-producing family and author of “The
Rational Optimist,” notes that the path of mankind’s progress, material
as well as moral, has been from reliance on renewable but insufficient
energy sources to today’s 85 percent reliance on energy from fossil
fuels.

The progression has been from reliance on human (often slaves') muscles,
to animal energy (first oxen, then horses), to burning wood and peat as
stores of sunlight, to energy from water and wind, to, at last, fossil
fuels. Sustained economic growth, a necessary prerequisite for
scientific and technological dynamism, became possible, Ridley writes,
when humanity was able to rely on “non-renewable, non-green, non-clean
power.” Because “there appeared from underground a near-magical
substance,” Britain’s landscape was spared: “Coal gave Britain fuel
equivalent to the output of 15 million extra acres of forest to burn, an
area nearly the size of Scotland. By 1870, the burning of coal in
Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by
850 million laborers. … The capacity of the country’s steam engines
alone was equivalent to 6 million horses or 40 million men.”

And cheap coal produced the iron for new labor-saving machines. The
environmental toll from burning coal (it emits carbon dioxide,
radioactivity and mercury) has been slight relative to the environmental
and other blessings from burning it.

In May 1945, Aneurin Bevan, a leading light among British socialists,
said: “This island is made mainly of coal and surrounded by fish. Only
an organizing genius could produce a shortage of coal and fish at the
same time.” Genius was not required. Socialism — command-and-control
government of the sort that climate fine-tuners recommend for the entire
planet — soon accomplished this marvel, with coal rationed and the
price of fish soaring.

The beautiful Champs-Élysées is lit with millions of sparkling lights.
This year, they are powered by renewable energy. There is a wind turbine
as tall as the Arc de Triomphe, and 440 solar panels take up much of
the Champs-Élysées roundabout. One evening during the COP21 climate
change conference this month, there was neither sunlight nor wind, so
organizers asked those of us strolling down the avenue to power the
lights via stationary bikes and hamster wheels.

“Pedal power” delivered great images for the television crews that were
here to cover the summit. But these “green energy” bikes amount to a
victory of empty gestures over substance and reason – which makes them
sadly representative of COP21 itself.
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The agreement reached in Paris contains promises that, if enacted
between now and the target date of 2030, will cost the global economy at
least $1 trillion dollars a year – and possibly twice as much if
politicians make inefficient policy choices. This makes the agreement
the costliest in history.

My peer-reviewed research paper, published in Global Policy, shows that
the 2016-2030 promises on cutting emissions of carbon dioxide will
reduce temperatures by 2100 by just 0.05° Celsius (0.09° Fahrenheit).
Even if the promised emissions cuts continued throughout the century,
the Paris agreement would cut global temperature rises by just 0.17°C.
Scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology find a similar
temperature reduction.

This is why former US Vice President Al Gore’s climate adviser, Jim
Hansen, who first brought concern about global warming to the public in
1988, called the Paris agreement “a fraud really, a fake” and “just
worthless words. There is no action, just promises.”

But politicians suggest the agreement will do much more. The agreement
concluded at COP21 goes further than the much-discussed target of
capping the global temperature increase at 2°C above pre-industrial
levels, but actually states that the aim is to keep the increase “well
below 2°C,” with an effort to cap it at 1.5°C.

This is simply cynical political theater, meant to convince us that our
leaders are taking serious action. But none of the actors is talking
about the impact of the actual, concrete commitments agreed in Paris.
Instead, they are placing their faith in deus ex machina: all the vague
vows and rhetoric about what will happen after 2030 and toward the
middle of the century.

The United States is a prime example of how far-fetched this drama is.
It’s no sure bet that if a Republican succeeds President Barack Obama in
2016, even the next four years of promised carbon cuts will happen.
It’s even more ludicrous to suggest that promises with a due date of
2050 will be fulfilled by whoever is president after 2030.

The Paris agreement features pledges on greenhouse-gas emissions from
developing countries, in exchange for which they will receive huge sums
of cash from richer countries. The poor countries will certainly take
that money, and some of it may even be spent reducing emissions. But the
world’s poorest don’t want solar panels or wind turbines: they have
much more immediate needs, not the least of which is for modern energy –
which mostly means more access to fossil fuels. It seems likely that by
2030, we will recognize that much of this money-go-round has done very
little to help global warming.

So, the Paris agreement is a phenomenally expensive but almost empty
gesture – much like the bicycles and hamster wheels cluttering the
Champs-Élysées. When I came across them, they and the huge wind turbine
and hundreds of solar panels had produced 321kWh of energy in nine days.
But the total power requirement of the Champs-Élysées lighting for
those days was ten times higher – about 4,500 kWh. Even if 200
professional bikers pedaled nonstop throughout December, they would not
produce enough electricity for the Christmas lights.

What’s more, none of the pedaling is actually CO2-neutral. The power
needed to manufacture and move the bikes, batteries, wind turbine, and
solar panels probably produces higher CO2 emissions than are saved. Just
the food consumption for riders to produce electricity emits 24 times
as much CO2 as the most polluting coal-fueled power production.

And even if the lights had been produced with dirty old coal, the
emissions could have been entirely offset on the European Trading System
for about €120. Then it would have been 100% CO2 free. But of course,
it wouldn’t have felt as good or created “green” images for television
crews.

The really important news from Paris was the announcement of a Bill
Gates-led renewable-energy innovation fund. The fund is needed because,
despite the arguments of the green-energy lobby and climate activists,
today’s inefficient, intermittent solar and wind sources are not yet
ready to take over from fossil fuels. Indeed, the International Energy
Agency estimates that the world paid $84 billion to subsidize solar and
wind power last year, and it expects that 25 years from now, we will
still be paying about $84 billion in annual subsidies.

We need to take other actions, too, like ending fossil-fuel subsidies.
But the smartest long-term climate policy is the one envisaged by Gates:
to invest heavily in research and development to push down the future
price of green energy. The promise made by Gates, together with 20
countries, to double R&D funding to $24 billion annually by 2020 is a
fantastic development – exactly what is needed. However, much more must
be spent to bring forward the arrival of a breakthrough.

Until then, activists and politicians can cynically proclaim their
“triumph” over straw-man enemies and global warming itself. But, like
those on the stationary bikes in the City of Light, they are spinning
their wheels and getting us nowhere.

More on the recent Paris meeting (aka COP21 — i.e. the UN’s 21st "Conference of Parties")

Let’s cut to the chase: these assemblies have n-o-t-h-i-n-g to do with
CO2, Climate, or Science. Instead they are about money, power, control
and promulgating doctrine.

It is increasingly apparent that the most fundamental objective of this
crusade, is to substantially undermine Western civilization. If you are
the slightest bit skeptical of this reality, then please read some of
the books written by US environmental leader, Bill McKibben. One of his
recurrent homilies is that “modernity” (aka Western civilization) is a
bad thing.

With Bill and his fellow acolytes, this is literally a religion. (See
here, here, here, here, here & here for sample reports about this.)
It’s important to note that when discussing someone’s religious beliefs:
facts, logic, Science, etc. are irrelevant (and irreverent) matters
that only come into play when they accidentally coincide with the dogma
being proselytized.

The good news is that these people are so mesmerized by their own
gibberish and greed, that (so far) they have been incapable of coming up
with anything meaningful. As Voluntary Mush says: in the end, what we
got out of Paris is:

1) voluntary emission caps,

2) voluntary progress reviews,

3) no international oversight of any voluntary
progress, and
4) voluntary contributions to the Fund.

That these preachers are spinning this pablum as a major accomplishment,
tells you all you need to know about the credibility of anything they
say.

Who is the biggest beneficiary of this insidiousness? China. What would
China and some of our largest environmental organizations have in
common? Communism — which they’d like to replace Western civilization
with. It’s all explained quite well in the trailer for Grinding America
Down.

In any case, below is some reasonable commentary on the Paris
convocation, roughly arranged in chronological order: before, during and
after.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

20 December, 2015

What happens when you use only quality data to measure warming?

I generally don't comment on reports that appear on the site of
Anthony Watts, because I assume that anybody reading this blog will
already be reading that one. He has a much bigger readership than I
do. This time I think I need to say something however.

The
background is that Anthony is a skeptical meteorologist who has long
bent over backwards to achieve some respectability among climate
scientists. That is not my style at all -- I never give an inch
for the sake of popularity -- but maybe Anthony is right and I am
wrong in the great scheme of things. And he has finally got what
must be his heart's desire by being allowed to present a paper at the
AGU. And it is that paper that I want to talk about. The
report below tells you some things about it but not, in my view, the
most important things.

For a start, there is here
a graph that summarizes Anthony's findings. It is too large for me to
reproduce usefully on this page but you can see it if you click on the
link. It is an extraordinarily poor graph. If I had been
handed it as a student assignment in my statistics classes, I would have
failed it. There is no calibration on the X axis and unexplained
calibration on the Y axis. So I have to be a bit approximate in
some of the things I want to say about it.

One of the reasons
statisticians graph things is to detect non-linear relationships -- and
when I look at Athony's graph I immediately detect something of that
kind. The graph seems bimodal to me. The temperature seems
just about flat up to about the year 2000 and then takes a leap onto a
new plateau after that time. So what I think we see is not a
steady upward trend but two flat records with a short sudden leap from
one to the other.

But Anthonly ignores that. His analysis
looks only at a steady upward trend. Why? Because his whole
presentation is designed not to rock the boat too much. By
combining the data from the '80s and '90s (which did show some warming)
with the 21st century data (which shows no warming), he gets an overall
upwards temperature rise -- which is just what the Warmists want.
By failing to consider the pre- and post- 2000 data separately, Anthony
ignores the "pause", the period in the 21st century temperature record
that even Warmists concede has shown no statistically significant change
in global temperature.

Anthony will no doubt say that I
misconceive what he was trying to do and that may be so but I am
concerned that Warmists will now be able to say that a prominent skeptic
has admitted that the globe is still warming after all -- when that is
clearly not the case. The overall temperature rise that Anthony
reports is nothing more than a statistical artifact, and a deliberate
one at that.

Here once again is the graph of the satellite temperature record:

Anthony's
data are of course from the USA only so, logically, one could say that
they tell us nothing about global temperatures. The USA could be
entirely atypical of the globe. I am not, however, aware that
anybody has ever put forward such an improbable proposition. In
any case, my criticism concerns the misinterpretation of a graph,
nothing more.

And if the graph is typical of the globe, it gives
Warmists a new big problem. None of their models and theories
even begin to account for a recent sudden step change in temperature
over just a year or two. Or have we already had the famed "tipping
point"?!

Surface temperatures recorded over three decades at 410 ideally situated
weather stations are markedly lower than temperatures recorded at
stations located near multiple heatsinks, according to a new study
presented Thursday at the 2015 fall meeting of the American Geophysical
Union in San Francisco.

The study examined the 30-year temperature records collected from a
subset of 410 weather stations belonging to the National Oceanographic
and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Historical Climatology Network
(USHCN) of 1,218 stations.

“A 410-station subset of U.S. Historical Climatology stations is
identified that experienced no changes in time of observation or station
moves during the 1979-2008 period. These stations are classified on
proximity to artificial surfaces, buildings, and other such objects with
unnatural thermal mass,” according to the study, entitled Comparing of
Temperature Trends Using an Unperturbed Subset of the U.S. Historical
Climatology Network.

“The United States temperature trends estimated from the
relatively few stations in the classes with minimal artificial impact
are found to be collectively about 2/3 as large as US trends estimated
in the classes with greater expected artificial impact,” the researchers
report.

The study “suggests that the trend for U.S. temperature will need to be
corrected. We also see evidence of this same sort of siting problem
around the world at many other official weather stations, suggesting
that the same upward bias on trend also manifests itself in the global
temperature record.”

However, “the data suggests that the divergence between well and poorly
sited stations is gradual, not a result of spurious step change due to
poor metadata,” they concluded.

“The majority of weather stations used by NOAA to detect climate change
temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial
surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner
exhausts. This study demonstrates conclusively that this issue affects
temperature trend and that NOAA’s methods are not correcting for this
problem, resulting in an inflated temperature trend,” said lead author
Anthony Watts, who blogs at Watts Up With That?

Greenland Ice Sheet lost mass twice as fast between 2003 and 2010 as it did during the ENTIRE twentieth century

There was NO global warming during the period concerned (2003-2010). That pesky graph again:

So
global warming cannot be held responsible for the changes
described below. So what might have been the cause of the melting?
Probably vulcanism of some sort. Greenland is not generally known
for volcanoes at present but had a lots of them in the distant
past. And the Arctic as a whole is still volcanically active. The
volcanoes of neighboring Iceland are of course well known and the
underwater volcanoes of the Gakkel ridge are quite explosive. So
there may be more going on under the Greenland icecap than we
know.

Some years ago an "unexpected" hotspot
was discovered under the Greenland ice and that could well not be the
whole of it. One might note that the extensive volcanic activity
under the Antarctic icecap has only recently become known. It is
therefore entirely reasonable to expect that something similar lies
ready to be discovered in the Arctic

Note also that the melting
recorded below was quite uneven -- not Greenland-wide. That is
much more consistent with random vulcanism events than with an effect of
global warming, which would affect the whole of Greenland

The
Greenland ice sheet - a potentially massive contributor to
land-encroaching sea-level rise - lost mass twice as fast between 2003
and 2010 as during the entire 20th century.

This is according to the first direct observations of the region's melting during the latest 110 years.

Greenland
ice loss contributed to a global average sea level rise of 25
millimetres (about an inch) between 1990 and 2010 - mainly from surface
melt.

The total mass lost was over 9,000 gigatonnes (billion
tonnes). It was net loss, meaning the difference between ice melt and
ice gain from falling snow or rain.

The study is the first time
scientists have been able to provide an accurate estimate of how much
Greenland contributes to sea level rise.

Data on the Greenland
ice sheet has been lacking in reports of the UN's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists in the study said.

It
also allows researchers to pinpoint where the ice sheet is particularly
sensitive and what controls the loss of glacier ice in Greenland.

'If
we do not know the contribution from the all sources that have
contributed towards global sea level rise, then it is difficult to
predict future global sea levels,' said first author of the paper,
Kristian Kjeldsen from the Natural History Museum of Denmark.

'In
our paper we have used direct observations to specify the mass loss
from the Greenland Ice Sheet and thereby highlight its contribution to
global sea level rise'.

The scientists were particularly
interested in the changes of the ice sheet after the Little Ice Age, a
period from c. 1200 AD to the end of the nineteenth century.

This marks when the ice sheet was at its largest during the past millinium.

Changes of the Greenland Ice Sheet are observed when the ice retreats and leaves an imprint on the landscape.

The
vegetation along mountain slopes was removed by the advancing ice and
once the ice begins to retreat the freshly eroded part of the mountain
slope is seen as a lighter colour than the non-eroded part where plants
were growing all along.

The results show that some areas of the Greenland Ice Sheet have lost considerable amounts of ice during the twentieth century.

The
mass loss along the southeastern and northwestern coast contributed
between 53 and 83 per cent of the entire mass loss for the individual
periods.

'One of the unique things about our results - which
distinguish them from earlier model studies - is that we not only
estimate the total mass loss of the entire ice,' said Kjeldsen.

'But
we can actually calculate changes all the way down to regional and
local levels and say something about changes for individual outlet
glaciers'.

The
$1.2 trillion year-end spending bill released by House Speaker Paul
Ryan on Wednesday does not include money for the United Nation’s Green
Climate Fund (GCF), but it does not prevent President Obama from
shifting funds to it from other areas, according to the White House.

“Based
on what we have reviewed so far, there are no restrictions on our
ability to make good on the president’s pledge to contribute to the
Green Climate Fund,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told
reporters Wednesday.

Obama has pledged $3 billion to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change.

“When
you take a look at the entire package, I think the country can feel
good about how this budget reflects the priorities that the President
has laid out when it comes to transitioning to the low-carbon economy of
the future,” Earnest said.

The GCF is the financial mechanism
that will be used to implement the United Nations’ Framework Convention
on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) Paris Agreement adopted on December 12.

James
Taylor, senior fellow for environment and energy policy at the
Heartland Institute, told CNSNews.com that the Paris agreement
“hamstrings Western economies to utilize much more expensive energy
sources that put them at a competitive disadvantage and hands over $100
billion to developing nations, which may presumably include China” -
despite “real-world evidence [that] continues to contradict the notion
of a global warming crisis.”

Taylor pointed out that China is the
largest emitter of carbon dioxide on earth and emits “more than all the
nations in the Western Hemisphere combined.” Chinese finance minister
Yingming Yang is on the GCF’s board.

James Taylor (Heartland Institute)However, under the agreement, China and India, another major CO2 emitter, “don’t have to do anything,” he told CNSNews.com.

Under
the non-binding agreement, China has merely promised to “peak” its CO2
emissions “around 2030”, but has not agreed to any actual reductions.

In
contrast, Obama pledged to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. by
at least 26 percent below 2005 levels over the next 10 years. That goal
would require implementation of the Environmental Protection Agency’s
controversial Clean Power Plan, which is being challenged in court by 26
states.

Nevertheless, Taylor characterized the Paris agreement
as a “crushing defeat” for the Obama administration. “They did not
achieve their objective, which was to obligate the United States to
internationally enforceable carbon dioxide restrictions,” he told
CNSNews.com.

“The only way that would happen is if U.S. policy
makers decide to implement the plan, and for that Congress has to come
on board. And Congress is not that foolish,” he predicted.

Republicans
upset with President Barack Obama’s international climate change
agreement remain committed to the few options they have to do something
about it.

“Honestly, I never feel helpless,” insisted Rep. Mike
Kelly, R-Pa., one of the leaders in the House opposing Obama’s climate
change plans. “Whatever is going to happen today is going to happen
today. This is a generational battle. If we think after one battle, one
skirmish, we should throw in the towel, we are not leading the America
that we have been entrusted with.”

“We will just keep fighting
and are never, ever going to give up,” Kelly added. “I just keep asking
our guys: What else can we do?”

Since it became clear that Obama
intended to pursue an accord committing nearly every nation to lower
planet-warming emissions without seeking congressional approval,
Republicans have tried to insert their authority into the matter.

But
Obama has no intent to oblige, and negotiators went out of their way to
word the agreement in such a way to where they believe it does need to
be submitted to the Senate as a treaty.

Opponents are also
threatening to use their “power of the purse” to withhold money that the
U.S. plans to contribute to developing nations to combat climate
change.

Obama has pledged to contribute up to $3 billion in U.S.
spending on the Green Climate Fund, including $500 million in fiscal
year 2016.

The Green Climate Fund is a pool of money through
which developed countries, with contributions from public and private
sources, help developing nations confront climate change.

The
climate change agreement does not legally bind countries to contribute
money to the climate fund, but it sets the goal for rich countries to
contribute together at least $100 billion per year.

A new
spending bill appropriating money for this fiscal year—which is expected
to be voted on by lawmakers this week—does not assign money for the
Green Climate Fund.

But Republicans were unable to attach a
proposed policy provision that would have explicitly blocked Obama from
sending federal money to the Green Climate Fund.

In addition, the
$1.1 trillion spending bill does not prohibit the administration from
transferring money from other accounts for the climate fund.

On
Wednesday, White House Spokesman Josh Earnest said Obama is interpreting
the spending bill as allowing him to pay into the climate fund, since
Republicans did not explicitly bar the funding.

“Based on what we
have reviewed so far, there are no restrictions on our ability to
contribute to the Green Climate Fund,” Earnest said.

Kelly, in an
interview with The Daily Signal, said Republicans would continue to try
to stop efforts to appropriate the money, although it’s unclear how
they can.

“If it comes down to this and we are going to take
hard-earned American taxpayer money to pay for it, than that is a no-go
for me,” Kelly said. “That is not a bus I am ever going to get on.”

If
the funding issue is indeed resolved for this fiscal year, Kelly and
other Republicans are still pushing for Congress to review the climate
deal.

Kelly is the author of a resolution “expressing the sense
of Congress” that Obama should submit the climate deal struck in Paris
last week to the Senate for approval.

The
combined measure, filed as a “concurrent resolution” last month, is
non-binding, meaning it does not function as law or require approval of
the president.

Instead, it is meant as a messaging vehicle to
pressure Obama to submit the climate deal as a treaty. The House and
Senate have not yet voted on the resolution.

Yet the Obama
administration, mindful that the Republican-led Congress would block the
deal, says it is not obligated to share it with the Senate.

Negotiators
argue that the climate change agreement does not include target levels
for countries to reduce their emissions. While every country is required
to put forward a plan, there is no legal requirement dictating how, or
how much, countries should cut emissions.

In addition, though,
the countries party to the deal have to legally monitor, verify, and
report progress on their emissions-reductions, there is no enforcement
mechanism, or penalty, for not doing so.

So because the Obama
administration says the agreement does not include “targets and
timetables,” U.S. negotiators contend that it can be produced as an
executive agreement that is already legally protected under a 1992
United Nations climate change treaty.

Lee, in an interview with The Daily Signal, says he is not buying this argument.

“I
am aware of no exception to the ratification requirement in the
Constitution saying if you don’t have any specific emissions targets in a
global climate change agreement, that means you don’t need advice and
consent from the Senate,” Lee said. “There are still obligations. That
is the nature of an international agreement. And when we are making
obligations, regardless of the nature of the obligations, we need to
have that review process—that’s what the Constitution contemplates, and
that’s the kind of process that guarantees the American people will have
some input.”

Lee said he has not received a commitment from
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., that he would bring the
“concurrent resolution” to the floor for a vote, although Lee believes
there’s a “decent” chance it happens next year.

Even if the
measure passed, it would be nothing more than symbolic, and Lee said
it’s unlikely a court would intervene to force Obama to submit the
climate agreement as a treaty.

“This is not the kind of thing
that is likely to be enforced by a court,” Lee said. “This interaction
is between two branches of government, and if we don’t make sure that it
happens, we can’t assume anyone else will do it for us.”

Both
Senate and House Republicans have already passed measures striking down
Environmental Protection Agency rules cutting carbon emissions, but
Obama would veto those measures.

The EPA regulations, which form
the basis of the U.S. commitment to the larger global climate deal, are
being challenged in court by two dozen states.

Republicans’ best chance to fight the international climate agreement may not come soon.

Since much of the agreement is not legally binding, a potential future Republican president does not have to uphold it.

“One
of the consequences of not getting Senate ratification is that it’s not
binding on a subsequent president, and I would not anticipate a
subsequent Republican president would be inclined to honor an agreement
that does not carry the force of a ratified treaty that amounts to the
law of the land of the constitution,” Lee said.

Kelly is less diplomatic.

“The
reality is, the whole world committed to a conversation,” Kelly said.
“This is a wish list. It has nothing to do with reality. I don’t know
who the president is going to be, but I hope that person understands
they are the best chance we have to make sure that in our lifetime we
are never going to walk away and say we can’t win.”

Secretary of State John Kerry, meanwhile, says Obama is not worried about Republican attempts to undo his executive actions.

“I
don’t believe you can be elected president of the United States if you
don’t understand climate change or you’re not committed to this kind of a
plan,” Kerry said on ABC this past weekend.

President
Reagan once said, “The nearest thing to eternal life we will ever see
on this earth is a government program.” The omnibus budget package being
negotiated on Capitol Hill is a perfect example.

The wheeling
and dealing is too complex and fast-moving for anyone to follow or
understand. But its energy components center on trading an end to the
40-year-old oil export ban in exchange for extending and perpetuating
renewable energy programs and President Obama’s dictatorial Clean Power
Plan.

It is especially maddening when supposed Republican fiscal
conservatives are supposedly in charge of Congress and the purse
strings. It’s especially despicable when the energy policies are based
on lies and fraud about “dangerous manmade climate change,” and on
blatant crony corporatism that gives coerced taxpayer subsidies to
companies that then make campaign contributions to helpful legislators.
It makes it perfectly clear why voters are spitting mad, and “outsiders”
have an inside track on presidential races.

The not-a-treaty
arrangements just concluded in Paris allow climate alarmists to claim
100% of countries now agree that climate change is a huge problem – even
though most American disagree, and some 90% of those countries signed
the agreement just to get their “fair share” of the $100 billion per
year that they demand from developed nations, which are now expected to
de-carbonize, de-industrialize and de-develop.

But where are the
dangerous, unprecedented rising seas and stronger storms? They’re not
happening in the Real World. They exist only in computer models and
White House press releases. But we are supposed to accept the hysteria
as fact; base laws and policies on them; and destroy millions of coal,
oil, natural gas and factory jobs, while we prop up wind, solar and
biofuel industries to replace fossil fuels.

The ban on exporting
American crude oil was enacted after the Arab oil embargo, and long
before the fracking revolution, when politicians thought we were running
out of petroleum. Now the United States and world have abundant oil and
natural gas, oil prices have plummeted to $40 per barrel, oilfield jobs
are threatened, and letting American companies export crude to Europe
and other regions would spur drilling and job preservation, generate
major tax revenues and greatly reduce balance of trade deficits.

However,
Democrats detest drilling and fossil fuels, and President Obama had
threatened to veto any bill that ends the export ban. So congressional
leaders cobbled together a deal that would lift the ban – in exchange
for extending wind and solar subsidies, and sending billions of dollars
to “poor” countries like China and India, for climate change “adaptation
and reparations,” while they burn more and more coal.

The
reported deal extends subsidies five more years. The wind energy
Production Tax Credit would be reduced 20% in 2017, 40% in 2018 and 60%
in 2019, after which it would finally expire (unless Congress extends it
yet again). For solar, the 30% Investment Tax Credit would remain in
place past 2017, then drop to 26% through 2020, then to 22% through
2021, then remain at 10% in perpetuity. Biofuel mandates would also
remain.

Just as bad, wind and solar would continue to be exempt
from the Endangered Species Act. Companies would still be allowed to
bury, hide, incinerate or ignore millions of eagle, hawk, other bird and
bat carcasses – and never be subjected to penalties imposed on oil and
coal companies for a few dozen deaths.

As Politico explains, the
“logic” behind these arrangements is that solar (and wind) companies
need this “lifeline” so that they can survive over the next few years,
“until EPA rules kick in and boost demand for their carbon-free power.”
As I see it, the omnibus bill sanctifies EPA’s draconian Clean Power
Plan and other anti-coal regulations, which force coal-fired power
plants to close in favor of wind and solar.

That would mean
millions more jobs lost in factories and communities that depend on
low-cost coal-based electricity, and on natural gas-fueled power plants
that are also under environmentalist and EPA assault. It would mean
ruling elites again get to decide whose jobs get preserved, and who get
the shaft.

It seems Congress doesn’t dare imperil jobs and
companies created via government diktats and taxpayer largesse. They are
granted eternal life. It likewise doesn’t dare furlough federal workers
for a few weeks, during another government shutdown over the budget.
Fear of being blamed for a government shutdown drives Republican
decisions – even though the feds would again get full back pay when they
return to work, unlike private sector workers whose jobs get destroyed,
often sacrificed on the climate altar, or for campaign contributions
from crony corporatist friends.

As to “carbon-free” power, there
is no such thing. Enormous wind and solar installations require coal or
gas-fired backup generating plants, operating at peak inefficiency as
they ramp up and power down when wind or sun conditions repeatedly
change. That means even more carbon dioxide emissions.

And as
even Secretary of State John Kerry recently admitted, with nearly 200
other countries still operating, building and planning thousands of
coal-fired power plants, even if Americans all biked to work and ended
all U.S. fossil fuel use, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise.
So even if carbon dioxide actually does drive climate change (which it
doesn’t), our sacrifices would be for nothing.

In fact, even EPA
analyses make it clear that a fully implemented job-killing Clean Power
Plan would bring an undetectable, irrelevant reduction of 0.02 degrees
Celsius (0.05 F) in average global temperatures 85 years from now –
because the rest of the world is not about to stop burning oil, gas and
coal.

But meanwhile we are supposed to blanket millions of acres
with solar panels and wind turbines, convert millions of acres of crop
and habitat land into biofuel plantations, send electricity prices
“skyrocketing” for families, factories and hospitals, and kill millions
of jobs – because our government says we must.

Then, even more
insane, the Republican leadership also seems prepared to end the ban on
using American dollars to bankroll our “fair share” of the
$100-billion-a-year Green Climate Fund. And they’re planning to
participate in this massive global wealth redistribution program in a
sneaky, stealthy way.

They plan to let the Obama Administration
have total control over $171 million that’s been appropriated in the
omnibus spending bill for the Clean Technology Fund and $50 million
appropriated for the Strategic Climate Fund – both of which feed into
the GCF. They’ll also end prohibitions on reprogramming $168 million of
Global Environment Facility money, so that it can be transferred to the
GCF, and let the Treasury Department use $50 million of International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development money for the same purpose.
Otherwise no ending the oil exports ban.

Presto! $439 million in
hard-earned taxpayer money becomes a down-payment to the Green Climate
Fund, as “reparations” for climate changes we never caused, and
“adaptation” money for future climate changes that will be no different
or worse than what humans have experienced throughout history. Of
course, the president and Democrats want a lot more – something closer
to $3 billion a year.

Finally, let’s assume Republicans agree to
all this pain, waste and joblessness, to end the oil export ban – and
Mr. Obama refrains from vetoing it, because he gets the “renewable”
energy subsidies he wants. Can we trust this president not to impose
more regulatory edicts to block leasing, drilling, fracking, pipelines
and exports? Or will we again be left holding an empty bag and looking
like suckers?

Simply put, would it be better to give up on ending
the export ban until we get a less anti-American occupant in the White
House – and just eliminate these wind, solar and climate fund subsidies
right now?

Voters should remind their rank-and-file
representatives and the Republican (and Democrat) leadership that they
are sick of the duplicity, double dealing and job destruction at the
hands of ruling elites. No budget deal is better than a domestic version
of the Iran nuclear deal or Paris climate non-treaty.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­Via email

Solar subsidy cuts in Britain put up to 18,700 jobs at risk

Government to slash rooftop solar subsidies as it admits for the first time that thousands of jobs could be lost as a result

Solar
panel subsidy cuts could result in 18,700 job losses, ministers have
admitted, as they confirmed payments to homeowners would be slashed in
the new year.

The Government on Thursday said it would cut level
of 'feed in tariff' subsidies for rooftop solar panels by 64pc - less
severe than an 87pc cut first proposed in August.

The drastic
reduction is nevertheless expected to deter more than 700,000 of the
900,000 households that would otherwise have installed the panels over
the next five years.

More than half of the 32,000 jobs in the
solar panel installation industry could be lost as a result as work
dries up, the Government's impact assessment suggests.

It said:
"There are assumed to be between 9,700 and 18,700 (out of c32,300) fewer
solar jobs supported on a headcount basis, and between 4,500 and 8,700
(out of c15,100) on an full-time equivalent basis by the end of 2018/19,
as a result of these changes."

Several solar firms have already gone into administration since the planned cuts were announced in the summer.

Alasdair
Cameron, of Friends of the Earth, said the "slight improvements" to the
new subsidy level would be "cold comfort to those who have already lost
their jobs and mean an uncertain Christmas for thousands more who are
set to lose theirs in the coming months".

To date about 700,000
households have solar panels installed. This would have more than
doubled to 1.6 million households if subsidies had remained unchanged,
the Government estimates.

Instead, the total is forecast to remain at less than 900,000 by 2020.

The
subsidies are funded through levies on household energy bills. A
typical household bill will be £5 lower in 2020 as a result of the
changes, DECC estimates.

But the industry has argued that a less
severe cut could still have saved households money without leading to
such a drastic reduction in installations.

A DECC spokesman said:
“The Government continues to support the low-carbon sector but for this
to be sustainable it needs to be driven by competition and innovation,
not subsidies. Subsidies are supposed to be temporary not part of a
permanent business model.

"We believe that the industry can
continue to grow and maintain jobs and we estimate that by 2019 the
plans we have set out today will still support between 15,000 and 23,000
jobs in the solar industry."

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

18 December, 2015

Scientific dissent squelched

Peter Wood, chairman of the National Association of Scholars has sent
the email below to members of the National Academy of Sciences
(NAS). He has also sent a version to the board members of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). It
explains itself pretty clearly.

But some important background:

The
National Association of Scholars was drawn into this by James Enstrom, a
former UCLA senior scientist who was fired after he blew the whistle on
a major fraud at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) which is
something like the California version of the EPA. CARB had issued
research findings (and ultimately regulations) based on a study that
Enstrom demonstrated was fraudulent. The main author of the study
had a mail order Ph.D.—as it happens, the address of the phony
degree-granting institution is on Madison Avenue two blocks from my
office. There was other mischief too, involving several of
Enstrom’s colleagues who had seats at CARB.

The National
Association of Scholars championed Enstrom’s case from the beginning,
and we were not alone in doing so. If you’d like more details,
there is a pretty full public record up to the point where UCLA settled
the case with Enstrom out of court in an agreement that sealed the
record. Enstrom, however, is still determined to set the
scientific record right, and that has become more difficult as the EPA
itself has built more regulations on the basis of CARB’s discredited
findings.

Enstrom sought to publish some account of this in
Science, the flagship journal of the AAAS, under the editorship of
Marcia McNutt. He didn’t get anywhere. But he did end up making the
acquaintance of other scientists who had similar experiences with
McNutt, who seems to have a track records of bolting the door against
scientists who dissent from establishment positions.

As it
happens, McNutt is now a candidate—the only candidate—to be president of
the National Academy of Sciences, the most prestigious body of
scientists in the country. Enstrom hoped that if he could draw
attention to this aspect of McNutt’s record, the members of the Academy
might have second thoughts.

I don’t want to put the National
Association of Scholars into a campaign against McNutt’s election, but
it does seem to me a good opportunity to raise broader questions about
how science bearing on public policy issues is now conducted in the
United States, where legitimate dissent is often squelched.

The occasion for this letter is Dr. Marcia K. McNutt, Editor-in-Chief of
Science. We are concerned that she is the only official candidate to be
the next NAS president. To be clear, the National Association of
Scholars does not oppose Dr. McNutt’s candidacy. We simply believe
that members of an important national organization like NAS should have
at least two candidates to consider when voting for your next
president. Indeed, the American Association for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS), which publishes Science, always has two candidates for
president and its other elected positions. Other scientific
organizations also have two candidates for their elected positions.

Also, we want to bring to your attention our serious concerns about the
current state of discourse in the sciences. Dr. McNutt has played a
significant role in three active controversies involving national
regulatory policy that deserve attention in themselves and that are also
part of a larger problem. The larger problem is how the
scientific establishment, particularly Science and NAS, should evaluate
and respond to serious dissent from legitimate scientists. This is
an especially important consideration for NAS, which was established to
provide “independent, objective advice on issues that affect people's
lives worldwide.”

The three controversies are:

1. The status of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-response model
for the biological effects of nuclear radiation. The prominence
of the model stems from the June 29, 1956 Science paper, “Genetic
Effects of Atomic Radiation,” authored by the NAS Committee on the
Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation. This paper is now widely
questioned and has been seriously critiqued in many peer-reviewed
publications, including two detailed 2015 papers. These criticisms
are being taken seriously around the world, as summarized in a December
2, 2015 Wall Street Journal commentary. In August 2015 four
distinguished critics of LNT made a formal request to Dr. McNutt to
examine the evidence of fundamental flaws in the 1956 paper and retract
it. However, on August 11, 2015 Dr. McNutt rejected this request
without even reviewing the detailed evidence. Furthermore, Dr.
McNutt did not even consider recusing herself and having independent
reviewers examine evidence that challenges the validity of both a
Science paper and an NAS Committee Report.

This is a consequential matter that bears on a great deal of national
public policy, as the LNT model has served as the basis for risk
assessment and risk management of radiation and chemical carcinogens for
decades, but now needs to be seriously reassessed. This
reassessment could profoundly alter many regulations from the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and other
government agencies. The relevant documents regarding the 1956
Science paper and Dr. McNutt can be examined at
www.nas.org/images/documents/LNT.pdf.

2. Extensive evidence of scientific misconduct in the epidemiology
of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) and its relationship to
mortality. Since 1997 EPA has claimed that lifetime inhalation of
about a teaspoon of particles with diameter less than 2.5 microns causes
premature death in the United States and it established an national
regulation based on this claim. Science has provided extensive
news coverage of this issue and its regulatory significance, but has
never published any scientific criticism of this questionable claim,
which is largely based on nontransparent research.

Earlier this year, nine accomplished scientists and academics submitted
to Science well-documented evidence of misconduct by several of the
PM2.5 researchers relied upon by EPA. The evidence of misconduct
was first submitted to Dr. McNutt in a detailed June 4, 2015 email
letter, then in a detailed July 20, 2015 Policy Forum manuscript
“Transparent Science is Necessary for EPA Regulations,” and finally in
an August 17, 2015 Perspective manuscript “Particulate Matter Does Not
Cause Premature Deaths.” Dr. McNutt and two Science editors immediately
rejected the letter and the manuscripts and never conducted any internal
or external review of the evidence. This a consequential matter
because many multi-billion dollar EPA air pollution regulations, such
as, the Clean Power Plan, are primarily justified by the claim that
PM2.5 is killing Americans. The relevant documents regarding this
controversy can be examined at
https://www.nas.org/images/documents/PM2.5.pdf.

3. Science promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and
excludes any contrary views. This issue has become so polarized
and polarizing that it is difficult to bring up, but at some point the
scientific community will have to reckon with the dramatic discrepancies
between current climate models and substantial parts of the empirical
record. Recent evidence of Science bias on this issue is the June
26, 2015 article by Dr. Thomas R. Karl, “Possible artifacts of data
biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”; the July 3, 2015
McNutt editorial, “The beyond-two-degree inferno”; the November 13, 2015
McNutt editorial, “Climate warning, 50 years later”; and the November
25, 2015 AAAS News Release, “AAAS Leads Coalition to Protest Climate
Science Inquiry.”

Dr. McNutt’s position is, of course, consistent with the official
position of the AAAS. But the attempt to declare that the “pause” in
global warming was an illusion has not been accepted by several
respected and well-informed scientists. One would not know this,
however, from reading Science, which has declined to publish any
dissenting views. One can be a strong supporter of the consensus
model and yet be disturbed by the role which Science has played in this
controversy. Dr. McNutt and the journal have acted more like
partisan activists than like responsible stewards of scientific
standards confronted with contentious claims and ambiguous
evidence. The relevant documents and commentary regarding the Karl
paper and McNutt editorials can be examined at
https://www.nas.org/images/documents/Climate_Change.pdf.

All three of these controversies have arisen on issues in which a strong
degree of scientific consensus became intertwined with public policy
and institutional self-interest. That intertwining can create
selective blindness.

Dr. McNutt has in her career found herself faced more than once with the
challenge of what to do when an entrenched orthodoxy meets a
substantial scientific challenge. The challenge in each case could
itself prove to be mistaken, but it met what most scientists would
concede to be the threshold criteria to deserve a serious hearing.
Yet in each case Dr. McNutt chose to reinforce the orthodoxy by
shutting the door on the challenge.

The three areas that I sketched above, however, seem to have such
prominence in public policy that they would warrant an even greater
investment in time, care, and attention than would be normally the case.
In that light, Dr. McNutt’s dismissive treatment of scientific
criticisms is disturbing.

I bring these matters to your attention in the hope of accomplishing two
things: raise awareness that the three issues represent threats to the
integrity of science arising from the all-too-human tendency to turn
ideas into orthodoxies; and suggest that it might be wise for NAS to
nominate as a second candidate for president someone who has a
reputation for scientific objectivity and fairness and who does not
enforce orthodoxy.

Climate deal 'signals end to gas cookers': They'll have to be phased out to meet new targets

Yet more expense and disruption from this evil Leftist hoax.
And even if we grant them their assumptions, what sense does it
make? Replacing a gas heater by a heat pump does not eliminate the
need for an energy supply. Heat pumps run on electricity that has
to be generated somehow -- but how would the vast new demand for
electricity be met? Britain is already substantially over-run with
windmills and solar farms but still gets only a tiny fraction of its
electricity supply from them. And domestic heating is mostly used
at night, when the sun doesn't shine -- not that it shines much in
Britain anyway

The Paris climate change deal spells the beginning of the end for cooking and heating with gas, experts claimed yesterday.

Within 15 years, British families may have to start phasing out gas
cookers, fires and boilers if the UK is to meet new tougher targets
aimed at halting rises in global temperature.

The United Nations agreement to stop global warming, approved by 195
countries at a summit in Paris after two weeks of intense negotiations,
commits nations to reducing greenhouse gases from 2020 onwards to halt
climate change.

It was hailed as historic by politicians. David Cameron said: ‘This
global deal now means that the whole world has signed to play its part
in halting climate change.’

But Britain’s energy plans will now have to be revised as our already
stringent targets to reduce greenhouse gases are based on limiting
global warming to a rise of 2C.

The new agreement is more ambitious, aimed at limiting warming to ‘well below’ 2C by the century’s end.

The UK is ‘absolutely committed’ to the deal and will be ‘making sure we
deliver on it’, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd said yesterday.

Experts predict the stricter targets will mean the familiar sights of
gas hobs and ovens and gas-fired boilers will become a thing of the
past.

Jim Watson, professor of energy policy at Sussex University, said: ‘This
will affect the power sector first, but as we move through to the 2030s
and beyond we’ll have to find new ways of heating our homes and cooking
our food.’

The Government’s Committee on Climate Change is pressing for
alternatives to boilers such as heat pumps – devices which extract
warmth from the ground or air.

It wants four million homes to be heated by such devices by 2030,
despite each costing £12,000, with installations accelerating after that
until gas plays a minimal role in heating and cooking in homes by 2050.

All gas-fired power stations must also close by the mid-2030s unless they strip CO2 from emissions.

Professor Watson added: ‘Gas has served us very well since the 1970s.
Whatever we move to next, people will be moving to similar levels of
comfort and controllability, which engineers need to get on with.’

Around 23million British homes use gas, with a third of natural gas used
in Britain burnt by domestic boilers, cookers or heaters.

Britain is already committed to phasing out coal fired power stations by 2025.

But gas power stations will have to be phased out next, unless a way is
found of capturing the CO2 they create – known as carbon capture and
storage.

Bob Ward, who is policy director at the Grantham Research Institute of
Climate Change, said that to meet Britain’s commitments the days of
cooking with gas were numbered.

He said: ‘The only possible use of fossil fuels that will continue is if
they are used to generate electricity, but this will only happen if the
carbon dioxide they create is captured and stored.

‘Gas cookers will be phased out, probably as soon as possible. I suspect manufacturers will simply stop making them.’

He added that in years to come some form of carbon tax putting up the
cost of gas is inevitable – which will make electric cookers much
cheaper than their gas rivals.

CCC chief executive Matthew Bell said: ‘For something like heating, by
2050 gas will be playing a much more limited role and a range of other
technologies will have taken its place, meaning low-carbon sources of
warmth – heat pumps and so on.’

Saving the planet has never been so easy. The Paris climate talks
concluded in a rousing round of self-congratulation over an agreement
that, we are told, is the first step toward keeping Earth habitable. If
generating headlines and press releases about making history were the
metric for anything, Paris might be as consequential — if misbegotten —
as advertised.

The fact is that Paris is very meta. The agreement is about the
agreement, never mind what’s in it or what its true legal force is —
namely, nil. Paris is a legally binding agreement not to have legally
binding limits on emissions. It might be the most worthless piece of
paper since the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawed war — about a decade prior
to the outbreak of World War II.

Politico reported that the talks were almost derailed at the last minute
by the accidental insertion of the word “shall” deep in the text,
which, by implying a legal obligation, was to be avoided at all costs
(the U.S. Senate would never give its assent to a legally binding
treaty). The U.S. scrambled to change the offending word to “should.”

The Paris summit operated on the principle of CBDRILONCWRC, or “Common
but Differentiated Responsibility in Light of National Circumstances
With Respective Capability.” That means nothing was actually mandated on
anyone because that proved — understandably enough, dealing with all
the countries in the world — completely unworkable.

Instead, countries came up with so-called Intended Nationally Determined
Contributions. That’s climate bureaucratese for “You make up your
emissions target, whatever it is, and we will pretend to take it
seriously.” Thus, do the waters recede and Earth is saved from looming
climate catastrophe.

Even if you believe the extremely dubious proposition that somehow the
climate “consensus” perfectly understands perhaps the most complicated
system on the planet, and can forecast with certitude and in detail what
the global temperature will be a century from now, Paris is a charade.
The best estimates are that, accepting the premises of the consensus,
the deal will reduce warming 0.0 to 0.2 degrees Celsius.

President Barack Obama praised 180 countries for coming to Paris “with
serious climate targets in hand.” This was ridiculous climate grade
inflation. As Oren Cass of the Manhattan Institute points out, Pakistan
produced a one-page document promising to “reduce its emissions after
reaching peak levels to the extent possible.” For this we needed a
headline-grabbing global confab?

No one will mistake Pakistan for an industrial juggernaut. How about
China, the world’s largest carbon emitter? It promises to reach peak
emissions around 2030, when one U.S. government study estimates that it
would hit peak admissions anyway, Cass notes. The more China promises to
confront climate change, the more it stays the same.

India’s assurance that it will make a roughly 30 percent improvement in
carbon intensity is, according to Cass, also about where it was
projected to be headed anyway. India still wants to double its output of
coal by 2020. As The Guardian put it, India “says coal provides the
cheapest energy for rapid industrialization that would lift millions out
of poverty.” India would be correct.

The agreement’s celebrants believe that by making countries report their
progress on cutting carbon emissions and by sending a stern signal
against fossil fuels, Paris will catalyze painful cuts in carbon
emissions somewhere off in the future. It speaks to a naive belief in
the power of global shame over the sheer economic interest of developing
countries in getting rich (and lifting countless millions out of
poverty) through exploiting cheap energy — you know, the way Western
countries have done for a couple of centuries.

If this is the best hope of the climate alarmists, their global campaign
will be a welcome fizzle. All things considered, it probably is best
that they occupy themselves with grand meetings and with the exertions
attendant to believing their own PR. Otherwise they could do real
damage.

Fresh off the heels of the Paris climate talks, the Environmental
Protection Agency has already made headlines. However, this time it’s
not because of failing to protect the environment, but because of
failing to obey the law. With the EPA being Barack Obama’s favorite
ecological weapon to enforce his agenda, one would think that the
all-powerful agency would be a bit more careful in pushing its
proposals.

It is worth recounting several of the EPA’s abysmal failures leading up
to the newest wrongdoings. First, we previously reported that an EPA
employee confessed to downloading more than 7,000 pornographic files to
his computer and watching them for two to six hours a day. Not exactly
the type of worker taxpayers want to be paying for.

Then recall that back in August the very agency that is supposed to
protect the environment was found responsible for breaching a retaining
wall during an inspection that led to the spillage of three million
gallons of toxic chemicals and waste into the Animas river. Of course,
the EPA apologized for the incident, but had someone in the private
sector been responsible for the spill, the fines would still be piling
up.

Then in October, a federal court ruled that the EPA had to stop
encroaching on all of the small waterways nationwide. The EPA’s expanded
interpretation of the Clean Water Act was an attempt by the agency to
take control of every waterway in the United States. The EPA has no
regard for state sovereignty, but in this case the court prevailed and
the EPA had to stop its power grab.

Yet despite farmers, landowners, businesses and the courts opposing the
overreach in the name of the Clean Water Act, the EPA decided to mount
an effort to engage the public on the issue with the end being enough
congressional support to pass legislation. Rather than relying solely on
the mainstream media to push its proposals the EPA turned to different
means — social media.

According to The New York Times, congressional auditors have concluded
that “the Environmental Protection Agency engaged in ‘covert propaganda’
and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the
public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect
the nations streams and surface waters.”

That’s right; the Government Accountability Office ruled that the EPA
went too far to push its cause. As the Times notes, “Federal laws
prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.” Not
surprisingly, an EPA official downplayed the findings by GAO and claimed
that the EPA was simply using social media as a tool to stay connected
and inform people of its activities. In other words, move along; nothing
to see here.

Further, the Times notes, “The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign
on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such
as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which
effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used.
The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water
sources.”

Moreover, federal agencies are not allowed to engage in propaganda or
other covert activity for the sole purpose of influencing the American
public. Federal agencies are also not allowed to use federal resources
to lobby for the American public to contact Congress to act on
legislation that is pending. Yet the Environmental Protection Agency did
engage in propaganda and did conduct lobbying according to the GAO
report.

Here are the examples cited in the report:

A thunderclap message was used to reach out to 1.8
million people to urge them to support the clean water proposal. The
message read, “Clean water is important to me. I support EPA’s efforts
to protect it for my health, my family and my community.”

The problem with this message was that the millions of people who read
it didn’t know it was being put out by the EPA; hence it is deemed to be
covert activity.

In a blog post, one of the public affairs officers
named Travis Loop claimed he was a surfer and posted a message stating
that he did not “want to get sick from pollution.” In addition there was
a link to an advocacy group for clean water and a “take action” button
that told the public to “tell Congress to stop interfering with your
right to clean water.”

There is definitely some lobbying in that post, but further, there’s the
made-up notion that we have a “right” to clean water as enforced by
bureaucratic mandate.

The GAO also determined that the EPA violated a
federal Antideficiency Act, which prohibits federal agencies from
spending money without authorization.

In other words, taxpayer dollars were used to fund the propaganda and
lobbying efforts. So instead of the Environmental Protection Agency,
we’re left with the Environmental Propaganda Agency.

If only the three-strikes-and-you’re-out rule could be applied to this
agency. But since actual accountability likely won’t happen, maybe, just
maybe the GAO report will have done enough damage and exposed the EPA
for what it is and the legislation before Congress will receive enough
“no” votes to stop this group of unelected bureaucrats from their
attempted power grab.

President Obama attended the climate summit (COP21) in Paris with
lukewarm support from the people of his polluting superpower. One
in five Americans don’t believe in climate change. In
contrast to the almost unanimous opinion of climate researchers around
the world, only one in two Americans believe that human activity is the
cause of the rise in global temperatures.

One of the skeptics is Wade Linger who introduced his doubt into the school textbooks in West Virginia.

The row over big American cars and sports cars make it
evident. Wade Linger (pictured) just wants to give it gas
and hit the accelerator on one of his 12 polished show cars without
thinking of the environment.

But resistance to the climate debate runs deep in the 58-year-old father
of five and owner of a software firm and garage called Wade’s Garage
for so-called hotrod cars with lots of horsepower in Fairmont, West
Virginia.

He is convinced that the alarming reports of the warming of the climate
are part of a great hoax. At the beginning of the year he became
well known in the USA as a member of the state’s Board of Education, who
was able to change the rules for the state’s school textbooks so that
they would cast doubt on the causes of climate change.

In West Virginia, where the coal industry is almost being wiped out due
to the strict environmental requirements from the Environmental
Protection Agency in Washington and stiff competition from other forms
of energy, such as natural gas, this is definitely not an unpopular
position.

In the run-off of the closures of coal mines and mass layoffs of mining
workers, many towns in the coal belt in the southern part of the state
are awash in unemployment and social problems. The climate debate
and stiff environmental requirements for coal-fired power plants share a
large part of the blame.

Therefore, no one was particularly surprised when the West Virginia
legislature passed a law that prohibited the direct sales of the
electric vehicles in the state because it is done without traditional
car dealerships. The preferred vehicle in West Virginia includes the
pickup truck, and the speaker of the state Senate, Bill Cole, just
happens to own a large automobile business.

Fear of student indoctrination

"If I believed that we were saving the world, I would join forces with
the environmental activists. But I don’t think that we have data
that supports the scientists’ catastrophic theories about the
climate. It may well be that we are destroying entire towns and
ruining the lives of thousands of families for nothing," says Linger,
who emphasizes that he has neither family nor financial interests in the
coal industry.

According to Linger, "all hell broke loose" in December 2014 when he
introduced and got the unanimous approval to change statements in the
state’s science textbooks. From stating that the temperatures only
rise, Linger recommended wording that temperatures have seen "rise and
fall" over the past century.

His changes also state that there can be natural reasons for climate
change, and that climate change is not just man-made. This
triggered a storm of protest. Linger received hateful emails from
across the USA and opponents started a petition against the proposed
standards.

"My goal was to create balance in education. Instead of becoming
indoctrinated, students can now critically analyze all of the data and
make their own decisions", he says.

Ironically, there was a blizzard and freezing temperatures when climate
activists, or alarmists as he calls them, arrived at the capital of West
Virginia, Charleston, to protest Linger’s recommendations and also to
discuss drops in temperatures.

The demonstrators were given time to talk at the meeting. One of
them compared Linger’s requirements for "balance" with forcing teachers
to invite a person who believes that tobacco is good for your health
into the classroom for discussions about smoking.

"This is actually a good example. Because we know that it isn’t
just tobacco that leads to lung cancer. But they don’t want to talk
about the other causes," answers Linger.

Uncertain of the science

In January, the Board of Education in West Virginia voted to bow to the
protesters and cancel the changes. But three months later, Linger
got his way. With the help of two newly-appointed board members,
he managed to get a majority to support a compromise in April.
Today in West Virginia textbooks and teachers must respect that there is
doubt about why there are changes to the climate. Instead of "rising
temperatures", as is stated in the books in the rest of the USA,
students in West Virginia are taught that "changes" in the climate occur
both up and down.

Linger is far from alone in the USA. A survey from Yale University
last year showed that 1/5 of Americans do not believe that climate
change is occurring at all. Only 63% believe the predictions of the vast
majority of the world’s climate scientists.

Attempts to undermine Obama

Last year, a survey from the Pew Research Center showed that only 50% of
respondents believed that emissions are the reason for global warming.

Many Americans have never heard the climate warnings. The debate is low
on the list of everyday worries in the USA, and when the topic does
appear, it most often occurs in the form of fear that the fight against
pollution will lead to taxes on carbon dioxide, and thereby raise the
price of fuel and threaten the American lifestyle. The fact that
new, American fracking industry has also made the superpower almost
entirely self-sufficient in terms of oil and gas also plays a role.

This has made gas prices fall and car sales to rise. Americans are
increasingly choosing to forego small and environmentally-friendly
vehicles, and instead are buying large SUVs and trucks.

Every year the coal and oil industry uses its assets to lobby against
stricter environmental regulations. Republican politicians play an
important role as spokespeople for the industry, under the guise of
fighting against layoffs and economic crises.

Over 100 Republican members of the House of Representatives, and several
dozen senators, are pressing to block Barack Obama’s plan to give
billions of dollars to poor countries in the fight against climate
change.

USA’S CO2 emissions are dropping

The President wants to give $3 billion to the green climate fund, which,
under the UN’s direction will give 100 billion dollars each year to
developing countries. According to many observers, this is one of
the keys to ensure the success of the summit.

Republican politicians make no secret of the fact that they are prepared
to use their power in the coming budget negotiations to prevent the USA
from entering into a binding climate agreement.

The majority of Republican presidential candidates recognize that
climate change is taking place. But the position is that the USA
should not enter into agreements that could damage the American economy,
especially if there is doubt about the size of the impact.

New numbers from the American Department of Energy are helping to remove
the pressure from politicians. They show that the USA’s CO2 emissions
dropped dramatically since 2007 and then flattened out. In 2014,
the USA’s share of the world’s combined CO2 emissions dropped to less
than 15%, not least due to a sharp reduction in coal-fired power
plants. The Earth’s largest CO2 emitter is still China with over
23%.

From ice age to heat wave

Wade Linger emphasizes that he does not want to be a spokesperson for
climate deniers. But for a man who claims to have no scientific
background, he is remarkably well-equipped with documents that cast
doubt on the almost unanimous opinion of global scientists.

During the conversation, just a few meters from his favorite car, a
Chevrolet Nomad station wagon from 1957, with a lowered undercarriage
and a new 8-cylinder Corvette engine, he passes paper after paper across
his desk.

The first includes an interview with the meteorologist Richard Lindzen
from the elite engineering school MIT. The 74-year-old professor
recalls how the hysteria in the 1970s over a new Ice Age transformed
into hysteria about global warming. He compares the proponents of
the climate debate to members of a religious cult.

In another document, Don Easterbrook, a geology professor at Western
Washington University, maintains that it is a lie that 97 percent of all
scientists are in agreement that CO2 is the cause of catastrophic,
global warming. He claims that an analysis of their papers show
that only 64 of 11,944 scientists believe that CO2 is a threat to the
climate.

Others show that inland glaciers started to melt long before we began to
release CO2, and that the number of hurricanes has dropped in the past
35 years and that CO2 is good for crops.

Wade Linger does not have any explanation for what he sees as a
conspiracy, but says: "my greatest hope is that people will remember,
when they finally are forced to admit that this entire thing was a hoax,
how adamant they were and how they considered people like me to be
crazy. I hope the people will be a little more skeptical when we
are presented with the next great political hoax."

A Finnish professor looks at the hanky panky in a climate record from
Australia -- showing how "adjustments" have turned a cooling trend into
a warming one. My rough translation from the Finnish below.
Finnish is a really pesky language

I wrote earlier today on the Paris climate agreement, and in
connection with our neighboring area, changes in climate statistics
graphs.

I compared the current GISS statistics in 2011 to previous
statistics. And I was shocked. See below the past equivalent comparisons
of Alice Springs climate statistics.

By way of background I on April 16, 2012 made ??a screenshot of
Alice Springs temperatures developments, because it differed
significantly from months earlier. Which differed from the earlier again
(and which does not exist anymore on the GISS website, even though it
was still there in March 2012 when I took the screenshot of the then
uploads). In April 2012, the statistics showed a climate that
cooled dramatically.

The Alice Springs temperature history, however, was once again changed
dramatically on 10/22/2014 far as the screenshot shows.

Time changes in the Australian climate statistics do not, however, stop
there. From the evidence of the current GISS: Look at the image
today. It tells more than a thousand words.

Pay attention to the last, and its differences to previous years.
And think about why all the latest measurements have been in need of
repair? Originally they seemed quite unbiased.

Compare also the magnitude of the changes throughout the period. Most
simply, it is by evaluating the images with minimum temperatures. You
will see that in the last hundred years, climate change has accelerated
remarkably high between October 2014 and to this day.

This is due to the fact that a hundred years ago temperatures have been
shown to have cooled considerably compared to the current high.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

17 December, 2015

Plankton and global warming: Another big crock of the brown stuff

A totally boring finding to the effect that warm-water creatures tend
to live in warm water has been hyped into a threat to our fish dinners

I noted yesterday
a new report that said plankton were dying out due to global
warming. And plankton are an important part of the marine food
chain so the implication was that our fish dinners are threatened!
As someone who likes fish dinners I take that seriously, but I recently
noted another threat to my fish dinners
that turned out to be "poorly understood" so I was inclined to be
suspicious of this threat too. But I was a bit rushed for
time yesterday -- I had to set aside some time for a sociable
dinner of excellent chili con carne -- so I contented myself with noting
just a few immediately apparent oddities in the news report yesterday.

But today I have had time to look up the underlying academic document. It is Plankton 2015: State of Australia’s oceans,
by Anthony Richardson et al., which describes itself as a
"brochure". It is NOT an academic journal article that has
undergone the rigors of peer review etc. And the apparently most
relevant piece of research by others that they cite turns out to be an
unpublished honours thesis! Rigor get thee behind me!

It is basically a bureaucratic document from the CSIRO, a once respectable but now rather controversial
publicly-funded Australian scientific research organization.
Warmists have got hold of it so there goes scientific caution and
integrity.

And the latest "brochure" is a good example of its intellectual decline
and irresponsibility. The very first statement in their "Summary
for Policymakers" is: "Climate change is altering plankton
distributions". That is partly all well and good: Plankton
distributions along the long East coast of Australia do appear to have
changed in various ways. But no evidence that any have died out is
presented and there is no note of any significant shrinkage in overall
abundance -- so the threat to our fish dinners dies at that point.

But what about the first part of that sentence? Is "Climate
change" behind the plankton change? We delve further into the
report and find that claim most interestingly expanded:

"Water temperature off Maria Island (east coast of Tasmania) has
warmed by 1.5°C since 1944, and is a consequence of global warming and
its influence on the intensification of the warm, poleward-flowing East
Australian Current (EAC). The EAC now makes more incursions into
Tasmanian waters than previously. The increase in strength of the EAC is
likely to be a response to climate change, and has contributed to ocean
warming off Australia ~3–4 times the global average."

Isn't that fun? It's changes in ocean currents that are now the culprit
and those changes are now only "likely" to have been effected by global
warming! Not a single piece of evidence or reference is given to
support that "likelihood" however. Let me guess why: There
isn't any. It's just a statement of Warmist faith.

So they have NO data about effects of global warming. And in fact
it is worse than that. Their findings are demonstrably NOT an
effect of global warming. They are a result of LOCAL
warming. How do we know that? Because, as they themselves
admit, the warming in Australian waters is much greater than the global
average. If it's not global, it's not global, if I need to put it
that way.

So what the report amounts to is a report of totally predictable effects
of a change in ocean currents. And ocean currents change all the
time and tend to be cyclic anyway. So the opportunistic
pseudo-scientists of the CSIRO have dressed up a perfectly routine and
uninteresting piece of research as if it proved something
dramatic: A threat to our food chain from global warming. It
does nothing of the sort. It is just self-serving propaganda
designed to shore up their research grants -- JR.

Arctic has its warmest year in history as experts say temperatures there are rising TWICE as fast as anywhere else in the world

Which means that what is going on there is NOT global warming.
It is LOCAL warming. Yet another desperate attempt to seize on a
local phenomenon as if it proved something global. And with the long
line of active volcanoes in the Gakkel ridge right underneath it, there
is no real doubt where the Arctic's warming is coming from

The warming Arctic has set another record. The average air
temperature over Arctic land reached 2.3 degrees F (1.3 degrees C) above
average for the year ending in September.

Maximum Arctic Ocean sea ice extent, which occurred February 25, 2015,
15 days earlier than average, was the lowest extent recorded since
records began in 1979

The average air temperature over Arctic land reached 2.3 degrees F (1.3
degrees C) above average for the year ending in September.

The new mark was noted in the annual Arctic Report Card, released
Tuesday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

'Warming is happening more than twice as fast in the Arctic than
anywhere else in the world,' NOAA chief scientist Rick Spinrad told
reporters in San Francisco at a meeting of the American Geophysical
Union. 'We know this is due to climate change' [How>]SOURCE

LOL. Are vegetarians to blame for climate change? Researchers find lettuce is 'three times worse than BACON' for emissions

This is going to put a lot of noses out of joint

Sticking to a vegetarian diet may not be as beneficial to the
environment as you think — in fact, it might be helping to destroy it.

A study from Carnegie Mellon University has found that many common
vegetables require more resources per calorie, and produce higher
greenhouse gas emissions than some types of meat.

While lowering the weight of the general population has been shown to
positively affect the environment, the researchers found that healthy
eating leads to a higher environmental impact.

The study examined the impact of food from growing, processing and
transporting, to food sales, service, and household storage, according
to Carnegie Mellon.

Researchers also measured the changes in energy use, blue water footprint, and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

'Eating lettuce is over three time worse in greenhouse gas emissions
than eating bacon,' said Paul Fishbeck, professor of social and
decisions sciences and engineering and public policy.

'Lots of common vegetables require more resources per calorie than you
would think. Eggplant, celery, and cucumbers look particularly bad when
compared to pork or chicken.'

Michelle Tom, a Ph.D student in civil and environmental engineering and
Chris Hendrickson, the Hamerschlag University Professor of Civil and
Environmental Engineering examined the food supply chain to understand
the relationship between obesity in the U.S. and the environment.

The researchers found that eating fewer calories and reducing the weight
of the population would lead to reductions in energy, along with a 9
percent drop in water use and GHG.

Fruits, vegetables, dairy, and seafood contribute to a 38 percent
increase in energy use, along with a 10 percent increase in water use,
and 6 percent GHG emissions.

'There's a complex relationship between diet and the environment,' says Tom.

'What is good for us health-wise isn't always what's best for the
environment. That's important for public officials to know and for them
to be cognizant of these trade-offs as they develop or continue to
develop dietary guidelines in the future.'

Scientists Who Back Paris Agreement Say to End Global Warming World Must ‘Abandon Fossil Fuels Completely’

So no coal, natural gas, oil or gasoline? They're dreaming wet dreams

Scientists who back the United Nations-backed climate change agreement
adopted in Paris say it won’t stop global warming and to reach that goal
will require future commitments that will eventually put an end to the
use of fossil fuels.

“Actually, scientists say the emission reductions that have been pledged
so far here are not enough to keep the world from a dangerous level of
warming,” Joyce said. “So the latest text says everyone has to keep
coming back and reducing omissions more and more.

“This has been quite controversial,” Joyce said. “And eventually, they
say, the world has to just abandon fossil fuels completely.

Joyce noted in the story that Republicans in Congress are against the
agreement and that lawmakers would have to approve funding the
agreement.

“President Obama knows that Senate Republicans won't buy this,” Joyce
said, “but the strategy is - the pledges to reduce emissions are really
not legally binding, only the mechanisms to make it happen.

“So this is the way they figure they'll finesse it,” he said, “but then
there's the whole notion of getting the money to pay for all of this.

Study: Allowing Energy Production on Federal Lands Would Create ‘Broad Based Economic Stimulus’

Opening federal lands that are statutorily or administratively
off-limits to oil, gas and coal extraction would amount to a “broad
based economic stimulus… without any increase in direct government
spending”, according to a new study commissioned by the Institute for
Energy Research (IER).

It would raise the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by $127 billion
annually over the next seven years and generate 552,000 jobs, the study
found.

“Wages would increase by $32 billion annually in the short run, with long run annual effects of $163 billion.”

Over the next 37 years, tapping these domestic energy sources would
increase the nation’s GDP by $20.7 trillion and create 2.7 million jobs,
according to Louisiana State University Finance Professor Joseph Mason,
the study’s author.

Twenty-trillion dollars is about the same size the national debt will be when President Obama leaves office.

“The economic impulses created by opening federal lands and waters to
oil, gas, and coal extraction could help…break the economy out of it
sluggish post-recessionary malaise…without any increase in direct
government spending.

"Rather, increased output would refill national, state, and local
government coffers without additional government outlays,” the study
found.

“Production on federal lands has lagged significantly behind the private
sector,” IER President Tom Pyle said during a conference call with
reporters last week. “We know that energy drives economic growth, so
when we produce more, we see a better economy.

“And we hear all this talk in Paris about de-carbonizing the global
economy, we hear presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders introduce
legislation called the Keep It InThe Ground Act, which in essence would
mean that there would be no production on federal lands.

“And so we’re here to show that these policies have consequences, real consequences,” he said.

Those consequences include forgoing the “broad based economic stimulus”
that fossil-fuel production on federal lands would deliver as well as
imposing massive “switching costs” that would be needed to power the
national economy with alternative sources of energy, Mason noted.

“So the point here is that with a full economic analysis of energy, we
have to admit that we would be willing to forgo $20.7 trillion in GDP
over 30 years, 81 million jobs, $5.1 trillion in wages, $1.9 trillion in
state and local taxes, and $3.9 trillion in federal taxes," Mason said.

"Forgo those amounts before trying to make those up in other energy
sectors, and of course maintain other economic growth throughout the
economy in the meantime.

“So this talk in Paris of switching to different energy sources embeds
in it a lot of very complex switching costs which need to be completely
taken into account, and I hope that this study fills a void in that
analysis.” he said.

Greens are using Cumbria's troubles to argue for tough climate action. Bad idea.

‘Countries across the world must cut carbon emissions quickly or we’ll
face many more storms like Desmond. This week’s climate talks in Paris
are a perfect chance for leaders to act.’ So say eco-ambulance-chasers
Friends of the Earth, exploiting the flooding in Cumbria to make the
case for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. But flooding is hardly new in
what is the wettest part of England. Instead of trying to blame our
apparently planet-wrecking lifestyles for flooding, it would be far
better to figure out how to make ourselves resistant to future deluges.

It is impossible to attribute any particular weather event to climate
change. At most, climate change may increase the risk of bad weather,
but how exactly that will manifest itself, and where, is beyond us at
the moment.

Those demanding action on climate change understand this uncertainty, so
prefer more circuitous formulations. So Professor Dame Julia Slingo,
the Met Office’s chief scientist, said: ‘It’s too early to say
definitively whether climate change has made a contribution to the
exceptional rainfall. We anticipated a wet, stormy start to winter in
our three-month outlooks, associated with the strong El Niño and other
factors. However, just as with the stormy winter of two years ago, all
the evidence from fundamental physics, and our understanding of our
weather systems, suggests there may be a link between climate change and
record-breaking winter rainfall.’

It’s a very convenient message to be able to deliver during the Paris
climate talks: if we don’t do something about our wicked, carbon-spewing
ways, then the waterlogged streets of Kendal will soon become the
norm. Which is a bit odd, since, in 2013 – when Britain was just
getting over a period in which water supplies had been running low due
to dry winters – the Met Office’s Hadley Centre reported that ‘droughts
could become more severe in the UK, particularly in the winter months
and towards the latter half of the century’.

In its fifth assessment report in 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) was non-committal on whether flooding had
increased as temperatures have risen, observing that ‘there is currently
no clear and widespread evidence for observed changes in flooding
except for the earlier spring flow in snow-dominated regions… there
continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the
sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global
scale’. In other words, there might be more flooding around the world or
less – we don’t know.

Events like those in Cumbria last week, and in Hebden Bridge in
Yorkshire in 2012, were the result of quite specific circumstances –
heavy showers getting stuck over a specific area for hours at a time,
magnifying the impact of otherwise normal, if very wet, weather. More
generally, the particularly wet weather we’ve had at times in the past
couple of years seems to have more to do with variations in the jet
stream, the fast-moving winds that circle the Earth. It’s not clear how
driving a Toyota Prius or turning the heating down a little could
prevent those variations.

Much more important than fretting about greenhouse-gas emissions is
figuring out how to control such inundations to minimise damage to
communities in their path. This means spending more money on flood
defences, but it also requires more imagination about other
flood-mitigation measures. As has been widely noted, flood defences in
Kendal had been raised after major flooding in 2009, yet the recent
torrent topped these new defences. Those defences still helped to reduce
the amount of water entering the streets, but perhaps in retrospect
other kinds of measures may have been better.

Coping with flooding may also require households and businesses to spend
money on making their properties more resistant when flooding does
come. Adding flood protection to your own house may, in the future, be
as much a part-and-parcel of living on a flood plain as having
substantial home insulation and powerful heating systems if you want to
live in chilly Norway or Canada.

Adapting to possible climate change – or better still, innovating around
climate change – seems a better bet than making feeble and highly
expensive steps to cut greenhouse-gas emissions in order to produce
marginal reductions in global temperatures. Preparing for reasonably
predictable problems like floods in the right manner will protect us
against all such floods. The same sums spent on reducing emissions could
only, at best, protect us against some possible future floods.

The real danger here is to give in to the anti-development mood of our
times. Building homes on flood plains does create the risk of those
homes being flooded from time to time, but we can surely do a lot to
reduce that risk, from the way we design new homes to manipulating river
courses so that the worst of any excess water is diverted away from
settlements or slowed down so it doesn’t arrive in a single torrent.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

16 December, 2015

John Kerry gets something right

Although he probably didn’t mean to, Secretary of State John Kerry made a
compelling case for why the U.S. and other countries should not go down
the path of shutting down coal-fired plants, raising energy prices and
stunting economic growth to combat global warming.

Speaking in Paris, Kerry said:

“The fact is that even if every American citizen
biked to work, carpooled to school, used only solar panels to power
their homes, if we each planted a dozen trees, if we somehow eliminated
all of our domestic greenhouse gas emissions, guess what – that still
wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest
of the world.

“If all the industrial nations went down to zero
emissions – remember what I just said, all the industrial emissions went
down to zero emissions – it wouldn’t be enough, not when more than 65
percent of the world’s carbon pollution comes from the developing
world.”

He’s exactly right. Paul Knappenberger and Patrick Michaels estimate
that the climate regulations the Obama administration are imposing on
the energy sector – costs that will be passed down to households – will
avert a meager 0.018 degree Celsius of warming by the year 2100.

In fact, the U.S. could cut 100 percent of its CO2 emissions and it would not make a difference in global warming.

Using the same climate sensitivity modeling as the U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world would only be 0.137
degree C cooler by 2100. What’s worse is that if you included 100
percent cuts from the entire industrialized world in their modeling,
then you would only avert warming by 0.278 degree C by the turn of the
century.

If Kerry got his wish, developing countries like India and China would
play ball. But they’re not going to and quite frankly, neither is the
rest of the developing world and some parts of the developed world.

According to the Climate Action Tracker, there are plans to build more
than 2,400 coal-fired power plants over the next 15 years. That includes
plants that have been announced, in the pre-permit stage, permitted or
under construction. These countries want access to cheap and abundant
energy, in order to provide their citizens with a stable current of
electricity and to keep their economy growing.

Kerry got one point very wrong, however. We’re talking about carbon
dioxide emissions, not carbon pollution. The administration has evolved
their message on this issue, from global warming, to climate change, to
carbon pollution.

Carbon dioxide is a colorless, non-toxic gas that does not have adverse
impacts on human health. Calling CO2, carbon pollution, is deceiving the
public. But at least Kerry spoke clearly about the futility of any
unilateral or multilateral plans to address global warming.

The draft of the international agreement to deal with climate
change, which is being considered today in Paris by representatives from
195 countries, calls for the developed nations of the world (which
include the United States) to transfer wealth to developing nations,
including through “public funds.”

“Developed country Parties shall provide financial resources to assist
developing country Parties with respect to both mitigation and
adaptation in continuation of their existing obligations under the
Convention,” says Article 9 of the draft agreement.

“As part of a global effort, developed country Parties should continue
to take the lead in mobilizing climate finance from a wide variety of
sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public
funds,” says the draft.

The draft agreement sets a goal for developed countries to dole out at least $100 billion per year by 2020.

The agreement at one point says: “Resolves to enhance the provision of
urgent and adequate finance, technology and capacity-building support by
developed country Parties in order to enhance the level of ambition of
pre-2020 action by Parties, and in this regard strongly urges developed
country Parties to scale up their level of financial support, with a
concrete roadmap to achieve the goal of jointly providing USD 100
billion annually by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation while
significantly increasing adaptation finance from current levels and to
further provide appropriate technology and capacity-building support.”

The text of Article 9 of the agreement states:

Article 9

1. Developed country Parties shall provide financial
resources to assist developing country Parties with respect to both
mitigation and adaptation in continuation of their existing obligations
under the Convention.

2. Other Parties are encouraged to provide or continue to provide such support voluntarily.

3. As part of a global effort, developed country
Parties should continue to take the lead in mobilizing climate finance
from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the
significant role of public funds, through a variety of actions,
including supporting country-driven strategies, and taking into account
the needs and priorities of developing country Parties. Such
mobilization of climate finance should represent a progression beyond
previous efforts.

4. The provision of scaled-up financial resources
should aim to achieve a balance between adaptation and mitigation,
taking into account country-driven strategies, and the priorities and
needs of developing country Parties, especially those that are
particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change and
have significant capacity constraints, such as the least developed
countries and small island developing States, considering the need for
public and grant-based resources for adaptation.

5. Developed country Parties shall biennially
communicate indicative quantitative and qualitative information related
to paragraphs 1 and 3 of this Article, as applicable, including, as
available, projected levels of public financial resources to be provided
to developing country Parties. Other Parties providing resources are
encouraged to communicate biennially such information on a voluntary
basis.

6. The global stocktake referred to in Article 14
shall take into account the relevant information provided by developed
country Parties and/or Agreement bodies on efforts related to climate
finance.

7. Developed country Parties shall provide
transparent and consistent information on support for developing country
Parties provided and mobilized through public interventions biennially
in accordance with the modalities, procedures and guidelines to be
adopted by the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the
Parties to the Paris Agreement, at its first session, as stipulated in
Article 13, paragraph 13. Other Parties are encouraged to do so.

8. The Financial Mechanism of the Convention,
including its operating entities, shall serve as the financial mechanism
of this Agreement.

9. The institutions serving this Agreement, including
the operating entities of the Financial Mechanism of the Convention,
shall aim to ensure efficient access to financial resources through
simplified approval procedures and enhanced readiness support for
developing country Parties, in particular for the least developed
countries and small island developing States, in the context of their
national climate strategies and plans.

This week climate fanatics have given us more conclusive proof – if we
ever needed it – that they have no interest in debate, or even allowing
anyone to question their crushing ‘consensus’. In fact, debate was off
the agenda entirely this week, after the BBC was reprimanded for having
the audacity to spend taxpayers’ money questioning the climate
orthodoxy.

What’s the Point of the Met Office? aired in August, as part of a
light-hearted Radio 4 series that takes on British institutions. It
featured a number of climate-change sceptics, including two MPs, who
criticised the eco-establishment – one going so far as to call climate
change a ‘fiction’. Naturally, this sparked a backlash among climate
scientists and members of the public who couldn’t deal with the thought
of people, in the free world, questioning conventional opinion.

A BBC Trust review, which published its findings this week, deemed the
programme a serious breach of BBC rules on impartiality and accuracy.
The BBC officially apologised in October, admitting that the show failed
to make clear that sceptics represent a ‘minority’ that is ‘out-of-step
with scientific consensus’. Now, in an alarming development, the BBC
has deleted the programme from its internet archive.

The implications of this are startling. Just because a few sceptics
dared to question the consensus, their contributions have been scrubbed
from the internet. It puts one in mind of Orwell’s memory holes, in
which documents can be dropped and thus wiped from the history books.

Even if you have little time for climate sceptics, this should concern
you. One day it could be you who finds yourself in the intellectual
‘minority’. By turning a blind eye to censorship you make a rod for your
own back. What’s more, you stifle the pursuit of scientific truth.
Indeed, if the establishments of past eras had succeeded in purging all
scientific dissent, we’d all still think that the Sun orbits our flat
Earth.

Cracking down on dissenting opinions benefits no one. If this is how the
BBC and the climate fanatics treat scientific inquiry – with utter
contempt – we should all fear for the progression of scientific
knowledge, and, for that matter, the progression of the human race.

TV station WPTZ reports that developers planned to build seven
500-foot-tall wind turbines near the town of Swanton, Vermont, near Lake
Champlain. However the industrial colossuses are no longer welcome in a
state that proudly views itself as green.

Vermonters are finding out quickly that wind parks are massively
industrial, not environmentally friendly, pose a serious threat to human
health and birdlife, and that they are eyesores that ruin the state’s
idyllic landscape.

Wind parks installed in Lowell and Sheffield have clearly demonstrated
that such projects are in fact far more environmental vandalism than
they are "protection".

The latest proposed Swanton wind park went up for a straight up or down
vote among the local residents. The Result? "Residents voted 744-142 to
support legislation giving towns the ability to oppose future projects."
That’s 83% to just 17%!

Residents be damned

So is this going to impress state officials, led by Governor Peter Shumlin? WPTZ reports:

State officials warned that the results of the two proposals are not
binding. […] Townspeople currently don’t have a say in area wind
development. […] Even with voting results, the state can still move
forward with the development plan."

In other words: Votes (democracy) are apparently no longer binding in
Governor Peter Shumlin’s the kingdom of Vermont. Has he lost it?

Moreover, developers cried that the wording made it difficult to get a
fair vote because it focused on the negatives of wind energy and not the
positives. However many residents argue that there aren’t really any
positive points and that the "clean energy" claim is only a feel-good
argument.

Wind energy is unpredictable, wildly fluctuating, severely stresses the power grid, and it is NOT cheap.

One resident in Vermont informed me by e-mail that the vote will not
impress the state and that it will take a voters-be damned-view and
simply steamroll the project through.

Irasburg residents reject wind park 274 – 9!

Meanwhile the VermontWatchdog here reports that the residents of
Irasburg, located in rural, scenic northern Vermont, just a stone throw
away from the now infamous Lowell windpark, also recently voted on a
proposed wind park, rejecting it by a vote of 274 to 9 (97% to 3%)! That
vote result was so lopsided that the 9 votes probably came exclusively
from the landowner and a few of his buddies. The VermontWatchdog called
the result "a stinging rebuke".

The spirit of Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys is alive again in
Vermont it seems. Vermonters must keep up the fight. The VermontWatchdog
quotes citizen Paul Drayman:

There are big companies that are right now buying up some very large
plots of land, and they’re targeting areas like this. … If we do not
stop this, in 20 years you will not recognize this area. It will look
very different." The "ruralness" that characterizes Vermont will be lost
at least for a generation.

Scientist have described the process that allows corals to form
skeletons, and they say water acidity doesn’t affect the process.

Those skeletons—destined to become limestones—form massive and ecologically vital coral reefs in the world’s oceans.

In a publication in Current Biology, Tali Mass and colleagues at the
Rutgers Institute of Marine and Coastal Sciences show that specific
proteins produced by corals can form limestones in test tubes.

These proteins, secreted by corals, precipitate carbonate that forms the corals’ characteristic skeleton.

"This is a first step toward understanding how coral build their
skeleton," says Mass, a postdoctoral researcher and lead author of the
study.

Water acidity does not affect the process, which suggests that these
organisms will survive in coming centuries when the world’s oceans are
predicted to become more acidic. That also potentially bodes well for
the health of the world’s coral reefs, which support ecosystems
essential to marine diversity that in turn support fisheries.

"The good news is that the change in acidity will not stop the function of these proteins," says Mass.

But she is quick to warn that her work shouldn’t make people complacent.
"Pollution and rising water temperatures also pose major threats to
these essential marine organisms."

Limestone rocks are all around us and have been central human history.
The Egyptians used them to build pyramids and today they are still used
to build monuments.

Surprisingly, all limestones are created by living organisms. The rocks
are everywhere, it seems, but how they form has not been answered until
now.

Scientists have long known that corals made their external skeletons
from a matrix of secreted proteins, but didn’t understand the mechanism.

Draft genome

Mass and colleagues began by asking which proteins might be responsible
for the process. They identified over 30 proteins from coral skeleton
that could be involved. They described that work earlier this year in
the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

At the same time they searched for genes in the coral genome for
proteins that could potentially assist with production of the skeletal
mineral calcium carbonate.

For this, the scientists went to Debashish Bhattacharya, professor of
ecology, evolution, and natural resources, director of the Rutgers
Genome Cooperative, and a co-author of the paper. A genome is the
entirety of an organism’s genetic information (DNA)—in this case, of the
particular coral that the researchers were studying.

"We produced a ‘draft’ genome," Bhattacharya says. "Basically, that’s a
genome that is not yet fully assembled into chromosomes. So, you don’t
have the DNA puzzle completely put together, but you have all of the
pieces of that puzzle and can figure out what the many pieces—for
example, the genes—do in the coral."

The genome analysis, done by Ehud Zelzion, bioinformaticist at the
Genome Cooperative, led the researchers to four particular proteins. The
genes encoding these proteins were cloned and expressed in bacteria,
then isolated and placed in solutions representing the current acidity
of seawater and the more acidic levels scientists predict for the end of
the century.

Acidic oceans

On the commonly used pH scale, where lower numbers are more acidic,
today’s seas are a moderately alkaline 8.2. But they are expected to
creep toward 7.6 as carbon dioxide concentration increases in the air.

Using a scanning electron microscope and other measurement devices, the
scientists examined the proteins and found that all had begun to
precipitate calcium carbonate crystals in the test tube at both pH
levels.

"This work goes a long way toward explaining how corals precipitate
calcium carbonate skeletons and clearly shows that the reaction can work
at more acidic pH levels," says Paul Falkowski, also a co-author of the
study and professor of geological and marine sciences. "It doesn’t mean
that ocean acidification is not a concern, but it does suggest that
corals will still be able to form skeletons, and coral reefs will
continue to exist."

Amusing that 30 years was chosen below as the start of the period
under examination. Carefully choosing your starting and ending
points for a sequence is one of the classic ways of lying with
statistics. Had they chosen to study the last 18 years -- when
there has been NO global warming, the results might have been very
different. So it is entirely possible that the effects they have
reported originated ENTIRELY in the late 20th century, when there was
some slight warming. Is that the case? They do not
say. If it is the case, the alarm they are trying to generate is a
hoax

Just by the by, there is a bit of a puzzle in the report
below. Plankton are much more plentiful in temperate seas than
tropical ones so what is meant by saying that plankton have "moved" into
cooler (more Southerly) seas? Weren't they there already?
Are they saying that tropical plankton are dying out? That could
conceivably be but if so, why not say so? The idea of plankton
"moving" seems very odd

If we leave aside silly talk about
"moving", is their basic finding that plankton are becoming more
abundant in cooler seas? If so, that CONTRADICTS global warming --
as warmer seas should have LESS plankton. What a mess of a
report!

Australia's plankton population, a vital key in the human food chain,
has moved 300 kilometres south in 30 years, new research has found.

Scientists attributed the shift to the warming oceans caused by climate change.

In some regions there was also a shift from cold-water to warm-water plankton species.

The Plankton 2015 report from the CSIRO is based on data from the
Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS), which looks at why plankton
is important to ocean health.

The report's lead author, Dr Anthony Richardson, said how much plankton
there is, and where it is, determines how many fish, marine mammals and
turtles are in the sea.

"The key findings are that plankton, which are really important to
people, are changing and changing really in response to climate change,"
he said.

"Plankton are responsible for about half the oxygen we breathe, and are
critical to the marine food web. "They can impact human life."

The report compiles information from plankton studies and data sets from
across Australia giving a snapshot of the climate, the state of global
fisheries and marine ecosystem health and biodiversity.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

15 December, 2015

Arrogance in the U.S. Senate

Last Tuesday, Mark Steyn appeared before a Senate Inquiry chaired by
Ted Cruz (See the post below this one for details). He did not
like what he saw of the way senators treat such sessions. An
excerpt from his report below:

In the US Senate, at least on Tuesday, senators wander in and out
constantly. Their five-minute "question" sessions are generally
four-minute prepared statements of generalized blather followed by a
perfunctory softball to "their" witness, after which they leave the room
without waiting to hear the answer - and then come back in when it's
their time to speak again at which point the staffer feeds them the
four-minute blather they're supposed to be sloughing off this time
round.

So by the time Senator Ed Markey turned up, I'd had enough of it. Markey
is the Massachusetts guy (whom I discussed on the radio with Howie Carr
yesterday afternoon) and he began by comparing Rear Admiral Titley to
Galileo - at which point I threw up my arms. I would have let this
twaddle go, except that Markey then went on to insult the three
scientists on my right. And, as with so many of the staffer-insulated
ignorant bullies of the Senate, he did so with no intention of letting
them respond.

Dr Judith Curry is a very brave woman who has withstood an extraordinary
onslaught from the ugly misogynist types that climate alarmism
attracts. She was not cowed by this know-nothing senator and she wished
to respond, as she indicated discreetly.

Markey ignored her. Again, we're way beyond the rules of the Senate
here. In the rules of life, a gentleman does not insult a woman and then
stand on parliamentary dignity to deny her a reply. If that's the
"decorum of the Senate", then Senator Markey puts the dick in decorum.
Nevertheless, with characteristic pomposity, he sought to use the
Senate's crappy rules to prevent those he'd abused from responding to
his crude insults:

Markey must have been a little shocked when climatologist Judith Curry
demanded to be able to respond to his testimony trying to discredit her
views on climate science:

"I did not ask you a question," Markey, a Democrat, retorted when Curry
asked if she could respond to his testimony during a Senate hearing
Tuesday on the science behind global warming.

"I was basically called a 'denier' — that I'm denying science," said
Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech University. "Did you read my
written testimony?"

Markey sought to discredit Curry in his testimony by framing her as
ignoring the evidence humans are putting the planet at risk. Curry was
not happy with essentially being labelled a global warming "denier" and
pushed back against the senator's remarks.

"Are you aware the IPCC and the consensus has no explanation for the
increase of ice in the Antarctic?" Curry said. "Are you aware that they
have no explanation for the fact the rate of sea level rise from 1920 to
1950 was as large, if not larger, as it currently is?"

"Are you aware that temperatures have been warming for more than 200
years, and, that in the 20th Century, 40 percent of the warming occurred
before 1950 when carbon dioxide was not a factor in the warming?" Curry
continued.

Curry highlighted even more uncertainties among climate scientists many
Democrats and environmentalists are loathe to admit. For example, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has trouble explaining the
recent "hiatus" in warming as well as the warming trend before the
1950s.

"Doctor, as I just said in my testimony — corroborated by Dr. Titley
[another witness on the panel] — this is the warmest year ever
recorded," Markey shot back. "Last year was the warmest year ever
recorded until this year. This was the warmest November ever recorded.
October... was the warmest ever recorded."

"You do not have an answer for that," Markey said before going on to
cite Galileo and claim Curry was relying on "something that is perhaps
God-made rather than dependent upon something that is man-made" and
backed by science.

"Are you saying there's no natural variability senator?" Steyn cut in.
"There were alligators at the North Pole. What was that? Was that you in
your SUV?"

Markey was forced to acknowledge the planet does in fact warm and cool
on its own, but said natural variability is regional and the warming
trend "is straight up."

"Do you know what the little ice age was senator?" Steyn said to which
Markey responded by claiming Boston's record levels of snow are a
product of global warming.

Steyn: What percentage of climate change is man causing, senator? What percentage of climate change in anthropogenic?

Markey: Well, according to the scientists who are in Paris right now,
which would fill pretty much the entire space of the building in which
we're in right now and the number of deniers would still be the ones who
are at the table.

Steyn: Yeah, what's the percentage senator?

Markey: What I am saying is that this warming is something that while it
may have variability, year-to-year in specific parts of the planet that
the trend is straight up.

Steyn: Yeah, do you know what the Little Ice Age was, Senator?

Markey: Again it is climate change. We had a hundred and ten inches of
snow in Boston last year with measurements of water 21 degrees warmer
than normal off the coast of Massachusetts. This was an unusual event
for us. The warming of the ocean intensifies the amount of precipitation
when arctic air hits that water. Now if you want to deny that, if you
watch these changes are taking place and that they're having a dramatic
impact, you are in the right place.

Steyn: You know what the winters were like at Plymouth Rock, Senator?

Here is the relevance of my question. The snow last winter in Boston is
only relevant in the context of the snow a century ago and two centuries
ago. Otherwise, it's merely an old weather forecast. So I was
interested to know whether Senator Markey knew anything about the
Massachusetts climate before last winter's snowfall.

Certainly, Senator Markey, like so many cowardly bullies, didn't take it
well. He was supposed to come back for his scheduled second round of
questions. But, after that exchange, he declined to return.

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz convened a subcommittee hearing Tuesday to
dispute the validity of research from climate "alarmists," whose
findings have become central to crafting environmental policy.

Cruz used his opening remarks to detail the 2013 expedition where a ship
of 74 people sent into Antarctica to research climate change got stuck
in ice, forcing an airlift rescue a week later.

"This expedition was there to document how the ice was vanishing in the
Antarctic, but the ship became stuck," Cruz said before the Senate
Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness. "It had run
into an inconvenient truth, as Al Gore might put it."

Cruz, who chairs the subcommittee, also noted Secretary of State John
Kerry’s 2009 claim that the Arctic would be "ice-free" by the summer of
2013—which was the same year the researchers became trapped in ice.

Republicans on the committee said the hearing was intended to shed light
on "opposing viewpoints in the field of climate science," which Cruz
said are "reflexively" brushed aside by policymakers.

He repeatedly pointed to satellite data that found no significant global
warming during the past 18 years, a slowdown often referred to as the
warming "pause."

"Global warming alarmists don’t like these data. They are inconvenient
to their narrative," Cruz said. "But facts and evidence matter."

Judith Curry, former chair of Georgia Institute of Technology’s School
of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, testified that while climate
scientists uniformly agree that surface temperatures have increased
during the past century, there is "considerable" disagreement about
whether humans drive global warming and if warming is dangerous to the
planet.

Curry’s research led her to findings that natural causes could be
playing a larger role in warming than human activity, challenging what
many consider "settled" conclusions in the climate debate.

But instead of leading to reignited deliberation, Curry said the science
community quickly branded her a "heretic" for challenging the status
quo.

"In their efforts to promote their ‘cause,’ the scientific establishment
behind the global warming issue has been drawn into the trap of
seriously understating the uncertainties associated with the climate
problem," she said, adding: "This behavior risks destroying science’s
reputation for honesty and objectivity. Without this objectivity and
honesty, scientists become regarded as merely another lobbyist group."

Democrats denounced the four witnesses Republicans called to testify as
climate change "deniers" in a press conference held prior to the
hearing.

"This hearing doesn’t make a lot of sense, given the challenges we are
facing," said Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the
subcommittee. "When it comes to climate change, the science is pretty
clear. It is basically settled."

As reason to close debate on the issue, Democrats routinely float the
statistic that 97 percent of scientists agree that human activity causes
climate change. But those on the right have pushed back on the number,
arguing it’s contrived from vague surveys.

"Any time you hear people say scientists should not question the
conventional wisdom, you are hearing someone advocating essentially for
the abolition of science," Cruz said.

President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry hailed the climate
change agreement passed by world leaders as a major achievement that
could curb global warming, but they got a quick reminder that
Republicans will fight it.

The immediate reaction of leading Republican critics was a stark
reminder of the conflict that lies ahead. Senate majority leader Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky said Obama is "making promises he can’t keep" and
should remember that the agreement "is subject to being shredded in 13
months," referring to the upcoming presidential election.

And Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma said that Americans can
expect the administration to cite the agreement as an excuse for
establishing emission targets for every sector of the US economy.

Kerry said from Paris: "I have news for Senator Inhofe. The United
States of America has already reduced its emissions more than any other
country in the world.

"This has to happen," Kerry said of the agreement, predicting that
voters would reject any candidate that doesn’t believe that. "I don’t
think they’re going to accept as a genuine leader someone who doesn’t
understand the science of climate change and isn’t willing to do
something about it."

Through careful legal wording, the Paris agreement will not be
considered to be a separate treaty under US law but rather as an
extension of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which the
Senate ratified in 1992.

In an interview taped for CBS’s "Face the Nation," Kerry called the
climate pact "a breakaway agreement" that will change how countries make
decisions and "spur massive investment."

He acknowledged that a Republican president could undo the agreement but
said there is already plenty of evidence that climate change is having a
damaging and expensive impact with more intense storms, wildfires, and
melting glaciers.

Leaders at the global talks in Paris agreed that while legislation and
regulation are essential to set the ground rules for the marketplace,
the ultimate goal of replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy will
require accelerated research, investment, and technological
breakthroughs.

Kerry said the US government had helped catalyze the agreement by
toughening fuel-efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, cracking
down on emissions from coal-fired power plants, and reaching a deal
with China, the only country that emits even more greenhouse gases.

Obama has endorsed the idea of a price on carbon — in the form of a tax,
or a cap-and-trade system like California’s — and leaders of Canada,
Chile, Ethiopia, France, Germany, and Mexico endorsed the idea at the
Paris conference, but there was not nearly enough support to incorporate
it into the agreement.

Although the pact was adopted "by consensus," no nation has signed it.
Countries will be invited to do so in a ceremony at the UN headquarters
in New York on April 22. The agreement officially will take effect after
at least 55 countries, representing at least 55 percent of total
greenhouse gas emissions, have officially signed on.

With nearly every nation having now pledged to gradually reduce
emissions, much of the burden for maintaining the momentum shifts back
to the countries to deliver on their pledges.

The new climate framework that’s been negotiated in Paris relies on
ambition at the national level, and a burgeoning civil disobedience
movement is planning to push for it on a global level. Thom Mitchell
reports from Paris.

Activists have drawn a ‘red line’ under a new global climate regime
decided in Paris overnight, arguing it’s a compact inked in the
interests of big polluters, rich countries, and without regard for
scientific reality.

Crowds approaching 10,000 defied a French ban on political gatherings to
march from the Arc de Triomphe to the Eiffel Tower, in a prelude to a
campaign of civil disobedience which they say will continue until
concrete steps are taken to solve the climate crisis.

Negotiators who’ve spent the last two weeks at a sprawling 18-hectare
conference centre at Le Bourget, on Paris’ outer fringe, claimed on
Saturday that they had cleared the way for a clean energy future free of
fossil fuels.

They received qualified but enthusiastic support from major
environmental groups, which framed it as a good deal, and the best that
could realistically have been hoped for in the context of international
negotiations involving nearly 200 countries.

But Naomi Klein, a Canadian activist, author, and board member of
climate advocacy group 350.org, echoed the sentiments of thousands
assembled in the shadow of the Eiffel tower when she told them the
"agreement, as we knew it would, puts us on a course towards disastrous
levels of warming".

"We heard our leaders say many of the right things over the last two
weeks in beautiful speeches," Klein said, "and yet despite their words,
they remain trapped in a broken system and a crashing worldview based on
dominance of people and the planet".

"That world view simply does not allow them to align their words with
their actions. And so the gap is immense between the rhetoric and the
goal of safety, and the reality of the epic danger they are allowing to
unfold."

Earlier, as demonstrators occupied a bridge leading up to the famous
French monument, one organiser had declared the text "a big f*ck you
from Le Bourget". "We say f*ck you too," he said, to rapturous applause
from the crowd.

As it became clear in the afternoon what the final form of the text
would be, another organiser noted "they have dropped any reference [in
the main text]to human rights, to Indigenous rights; they have locked us
in to a three degree world".

Demonstrators had endorsed calls for a lower threshold for temperature
rise of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, chanting the call for "1.5 to
stay alive" which was issued most strongly at the conference by Pacific
Island leaders and other climate-vulnerable nations.

Protestor Gwendolyn Grey told New Matilda that the three degree
temperature rise which current national commitments would add up to is a
clear failure.

"For me it’s like, just set your house on fire and get ahead of the game," the seasoned Canadian climate campaigner said.

"If you’re young, you don’t realise a decade is like nothing," she said.
"It’s like the snap of a finger. It’s like having ten dollars. It’s not
much money, and it’s not much time. We’re on borrowed time, and it
behooves us to start acting now like all the people here today."

Another activist, Sam Castro, from Australia, said "people are
understandably angry". "This is our future and there’s no more time to
mess around with this," she said. "This falls back on the leaders of the
world which have been unable to reach an agreement which is actually
stop our Pacific brothers and sisters from drowning.

"It’s their fault that we’re all out on the streets. So if it’s an
inconvenience, we’re sorry, but the people are pretty determined to
express themselves."

The deal which was done in Paris sets out a pathway towards closing the
gap between the two degree target, and the at least 2.7 degrees current
plans would lock in, and it includes an aspirational reference to
staying below 1.5 degrees warming.

But the ‘bottom-up’ approach the United Nations process took, asking
individual nations submit increasingly ambitious climate change plans
over time, offers no concrete assurance that these targets will be met.

The plans that countries do put forward are not legally binding in terms
of their implementation, but environmental campaigners elsewhere have
welcomed the "balanced" plan which includes periodic reviews that will
"inform" governments with a view to "updating and enhancing" their
efforts.

The activists who descended on the Eiffel Tower yesterday are determined
to ensure that the large-scale expression of urgency they represent
also informs national level policies.

"It even says it in the text itself," Klein said. "What it says is ‘we
note with concern’ that the commitments that governments have brought to
not bring us to 2 degrees celsius, or 1.5 deg celsius.

"We note this as well, but not just with concern; we note this with
alarm, and we say that our leaders have shown themselves willing to set
our world on fire, and we will not let them," she said.

"And that our mood today, here in front of the Eiffel Tower, earlier at
the Red Lines event, is not one of despair but rather our mood is one of
clarifying purpose and commitment.

"We knew that those were not the real leaders: We knew that the leaders
were in the streets, that the leaders were in the fields, that this city
is filled with climate heroes."

"It’s our responsibility to keep [fossil fuels]in the ground" was one of
the most common refrains of the demonstration, but there was also
widespread concern that the climate regime which has been codified in
Paris does not address many of the systematic root causes which gave
rise to the climate crisis in the first place.

"System change, not climate change" has been an overarching message at
political demonstrations in Paris during the course of the two-week
climate negotiations. Yesterday, demonstrators diverted occasionally
from climate-related chants, launching instead into refrains like "say
it loud, say it clear, refugees are welcome here".

Again, Klein captured the mood when she said "the gap is immense between
the expressions of solidarity with the most vulnerable, and the reality
of those leaders consistently putting the interests of the rich and the
powerful before those interests of the vulnerable, and indeed all of
humanity".

"I did a search," she said. "I did a word search on the final text, and
the words ‘fossil fuels’ do not appear once in the text. What that means
is that our leaders have none of the courage it takes to stand up to
those corporate interests that are responsible for this crisis.

"They can’t even say the words. So it is up to us to do what they so
clearly refuse to do, which is stand up to the polluters and make them
pay, and we will do this everywhere, using every tool that we can," she
said.

"We will do it in the streets with protests like this, and we will do it
in the face of every single polluting project that they decide to try
to roll out."

A major program of civil disobedience is planned to take place across 12
countries between May 7 and 13 next year, 350.org announced at the
Paris climate summit.

Saying it will have a ‘chilling effect’ on science, eight scientific
organizations have sent a letter this week to Rep. Lamar Smith (R) for
investigating corruption at NOAA.

Whistleblowers came forward during a congressional oversight hearing
about data manipulation in a much-hyped global warming study. Rep.
Smith, who chairs the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology,
has subpoenaed government-owned emails related to NOAA’s work to
determine if a landmark global warming study was "rushed to publication"
to fit Obama’s "aggressive climate agenda."

The top scientific organizations opposed to this investigation, the
American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the American
Chemical Society, American Geophysical Union, American Meteorological
Society, American Statistical Association,Ecological Society of
America,Geological Society of America, and the Society for Conservation
Biology, believe Smith’s investigation is an "affront to science" and a
partisan witch hunt.

All of the organizations ostensibly represent the will of its members, but surveys have shown that’s not necessarily the case.

At issue is a June paper (a.k.a. the Karl study) released by NOAA’s
National Center for Environmental Information (NCEI) that claims the
global warming pause for the last 18-26 years was a figment of
"uncorrected" data. NOAA removed the pause by tinkering with the data to
produce the desired outcome, leaving many top climate scientists
bewildered. And not just skeptics.

And those that speak up or challenge the underlying science are quickly
"tossed out of the global warming tribe," writes The Spectator. Michael
Mann, a climate scientist and professor at Penn State, is one of that
tribe’s leaders. A "vociferous advocate of extreme measures to prevent a
climatic Armageddon," Mann calls anyone that questions it
‘anti-science.’ Much like the organizations attacking Rep. Smith’s
congressional inquiry.

One reason Smith is investigating the whistleblowers‘ accusations in the
Karl study isbecause "businesses, governments, and academics rely
heavily on NCEI data to make informed decisions to help grow the economy
and protect public safety and theenvironment." But if the data has been
willfully tampered with, the outputted figures are essentially useless.
Prior to the Karl study, NOAA and other scientific organizations have
released numerous studies that acknowledge a global warming pause for
the last 18-26 years, and there have been nearly 70 excuses trying to
shoo it away.

Once NOAA rewrote its own temperature data, NASA announced a month later
it would now supplant its own temperature data with those from NOAA.
That brought the total to two government agencies saying the global
warming pause never occurred and that 2015 was turning out to be the
hottest year since recordkeeping began (with the Paris Climate Talks
kicking off this weekend, its not surprising). This despite a severe
lack of "extreme weather" or climatostrophies that scientists claimed
would happen in a warming world.

But facts say differently. As laid out by the popular science blog Watts
up with that?, this year has shown record sea ice in Antarctica, Arctic
sea ice extent rebounding, record snowfall across the country, record
cold (e.g., Polar Vortex) across the globe, no increase in sea level
rise, a thriving polar bear population (despite the so-called heat), CO2
levels rising less than 2 parts per million in 2014, and satellite data
showing that 2014 (and 2015) has not been the warmest year ever. Most
ground-based weather monitoring stations are affected by their
surroundings, with many situated in cities where the Urban Heat Island
effect makes them all but useless.

Another reason Rep. Smith may be asking for government-owned work emails
related to the Karl study is the fiasco that happened in 2009. At that
time, hackers (or possibly an insider) broke into the servers of the
Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia/UK and released
thousands of emails onto the web. The emails showed a disturbing trend
to silence dissension, and "manipulated or suppressed evidence in order
to support their cause."

While it garnered worldwide attention and generated much debate, it also
showed unbecoming behavior by many prominent climate scientists (and
even inspired a scathing Law & Order episode). Internal
investigations by the organizations impacted by the email scandal showed
"no wrongdoing," but all agreed that scientists needed to be more
transparent and openly share their data (sound familiar?).

So far NOAA isn’t budging and is refusing to comply with Smith’s
requests. So much so that Smith had to send a second letter to Commerce
Secretary Penny Pritzker, who oversees NOAA. In it he asks Pritzker to
have her NOAA employees comply with his request or he will be forced to
use a Congressional subpoena.

As of press time, Pritzker has refused to comply, and Smith subpoenaed
the requested internal documents. What NOAA scientists are disputing is
that government-owned emails are not the property of the government and
cited ‘confidentiality concerns.’ This was the same justification the
EPA used when they were asked to produce the "secret science" behind all
the new rules and regulations it has imposed since Obama took office.

Ironically, Rush Holt, who is the CEO of the AAAS and who spearheaded
the letter, told the Washington Post: "This is not just a few scientists
grousing about somebody besmirching the work of a group of scientists.
It’s an affront to the scientific process."

That was also one of the chief complaints by whistleblowers, who said
the Karl study ignored the basic tenets of the scientific method,
"rushed to publication despite concerns from other scientists," ignored
"established NOAA standards" and possibly violated its own "integrity
policies." Smith continues to wait for these internal documents.

The letter to Smith by these eight organizations admits that Congress
does have oversight responsibility, but that its inquiries "should not
be used as a tool to inhibit the ability of federal scientists to
fulfill" their goals. But Smith isn’t investigating NOAA’s goals, only
its alleged misdeeds. Why was the Karl study rushed to publication over
the objections of other NOAA scientists and why did it ignore the
scientific method?

Environment Minister Greg Hunt has defended the non-binding nature of
the Paris climate agreement, as the Turnbull government stares down
climate change dissenters within its own ranks.

Liberal MP Dennis Jensen, an outspoken climate change sceptic, warned
the agreement was "essentially meaningless" and Australia should avoid
"metaphorically burning our economy just to appear good on the global
stage".

"Basically countries set their own targets and there’s no enforcement
strategy. It provides flexibility to do anything essentially," he told
ABC Radio.

"The entire globe needs to have similar commitments and be similarly achieving those goals."

Another Liberal MP, Craig Kelly, mocked the agreement on Facebook:
"Hallelujah. The world is saved ... The polar bears can sleep soundly
tonight."

Mr Hunt regretted there would be "no sanctions or penalties if a country falls short of its target".

"Our preference would have been for that. That’s probably the only real
and significant element that we would have wanted, but we all knew that
that wasn’t possible for the United States, it wasn’t on China’s
agenda," he told Macquarie Radio.

"Others haven’t always honoured their agreements in the past, that is
true. But the difference this time is everybody’s in the cart,
everybody’s made their commitment; if countries fall short of that or
indeed they renege on it I think there would be enormous internal and
external pressure and criticism."

Mr Hunt said Australia was on-track to meet its 2030 target to cut
greenhouse gas emissions by 26 to 28 per cent, relative to 2005 levels.

"It leaves Australia out of the pack from the rest. We know Australia’s
targets are now well in excess of what other countries have. We’re
failing to demonstrate the level of ambition that Britain, the United
States, Canada now ... are showing," he told Sky News.

Communications Minister Mitch Fifield said the government trusted Mr
Hunt to ensure Australia met its targets. He said South Australian
premier Jay Weatherill deserved "full credit" for his "brave" decision
to launch an inquiry into nuclear fuel cycle.

"Ultimately nuclear power will be something that is determined by …
whether the community will accept it and … the economics of it," Senator
Fifield told Sky News.

Dr Leigh said Labor was opposed to establishing a domestic nuclear power industry.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

14 December, 2015

LOL. An unenforceable agreement to do the impossible!

The Greenies are right about the climate agreement just signed in Paris. They think it's a crock. It is.

1. A long-term goal to limit global warming to 2C, or 1.5C if possible

2. National pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the 2020s

3. A plan to make countries pledge deeper emissions cuts in future, improving their plans every five years

4. Rich nations to provide funding to poorer ones – ‘mobilising’ $100bn a year until 2025, and more thereafter

5. A plan to monitor progress and hold countries to account

It's
all just an expression of intentions with the only definite goal being
to limit global warming. But they have no means of doing that.
Warming does not track CO2 and they have made no firm committments to
control CO2 anyway. And since the warming has already stopped the
goal is pointless. You can't close a door that is already
closed! And most of the goals are nicely in the future when most
of the signatories will be hors de combat

And it has no enforcement mechanism anyway

There were tears of joy as delegates finally agreed to the world's first
comprehensive climate agreement after two weeks of negotiations in
Paris.

The Paris Agreement was passed with no objections by French Foreign
Minister Laurent Fabius, bringing to an end four years' of discussion
and debate.

Nearly 200 nations adopted the global pact, calling on the world to
collectively cut and then eliminate greenhouse gas pollution - but
imposing no sanctions on countries that don't.

To a reception of whoops and cheers, Laurent Fabius told the hall: 'I
now invite the COP [conference of the parties] to adopt the decision. I
see no objections. The Paris agreement is adopted.'

The plenary hall then rose to give him a standing ovation.

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres said: 'I used to say we must, we can, we will - today we can say we did.'

The first draft of the 'historic' legally binding agreement had been reached around midday.

The report confirmed countries - if they accept the 31-page draft - will
be expected to work towards limiting global warming to 2C above
pre-industrial levels.

However, the agreement took several more hours to reach - with one
western diplomat revealing it was held up for two hours by the U.S.,
which was unhappy with one word.

The diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the U.S. wants
the word 'shall' changed to 'should' in a clause on emissions targets
out of fears that it might require the Obama administration to seek
approval from the Republican-controlled Senate.

Prime Minister David Cameron said the universal climate deal agreed in
Paris 'means that the whole world has signed to play its part in halting
climate change', adding: 'It's a moment to remember and a huge step
forward in helping to secure the future of our planet.'

President Barack Obama tweeted: 'This is huge: Almost every country in
the world just signed on to the on climate change—thanks to American
leadership.'

Kevin Watkins, executive director of the Overseas Development Institute,
said: 'It is a tough message to deliver after two weeks of intense
negotiations that have delivered an ambitious deal, but the challenge
governments are facing can be summarised in five words – 'now for the
hard part'.'

Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace praised the accord was a good start but isn't enough.

'Today the human race has joined in a common cause, but it's what
happens after this conference that really matters,' he said. 'This deal
alone won't dig us out the hole we're in, but it makes the sides less
steep.'

But Friends of the Earth said it was a 'disaster'.

In a statement released by the group, they said: 'The draft Paris
agreement puts us on track for a planet three degrees hotter than today.
This would be a disaster.

'The reviews in this agreement are too weak and too late. The finance
figures have no bearing on the scale of need. It's empty.'

Nick Dearden, director of Global Justice Now, added: 'It's outrageous
that the deal that's on the table is being spun as a success when it
undermines the rights of the world's most vulnerable communities and has
almost nothing binding to ensure a safe and liveable climate for future
generations.'

The trillion pound bill: That's what this respected expert says the
climate summit may cost the world each year. And yet, he argues, it will
hardly change a thing

By Bjorn Lomborg

As you might expect, the UN Climate Change Conference in Paris, which
reached an agreement yesterday to limit the rise in global temperature
to less than 2C, has been an international festival of hot air.

The bland, suburban conference centre hosting the two weeks of talks is
populated by oversized animal cut-outs – a blue giraffe, a red camel –
that we attendees use as landmarks to find our way around.

You hear people shouting into their phone, ‘I’m waiting by the pink
kangaroo!’ But the outwardly cheerful menagerie is actually a Noah’s Ark
installation designed to remind delegates of the perils of inaction.
Woe to the pink kangaroo if the delegates fail to halt global warming.

Even the ‘welcome bags’ are worthy, made out of politically correct recycled cloth.

Our French hosts are quick to point out that their government will
purchase ‘carbon offsets’ – somewhere a lot of trees will be planted –
to balance the environmental damage caused by this massive talkfest.

Within limits, of course. Though there are an astonishing 40,000 people
here (30,000 more than recent conferences), the French will ‘offset’ the
emissions of just 22,000 official delegates. The other 18,000 should
presumably plant their own trees.

The first two days belonged to politicians, and were dominated by lofty
rhetoric. Nearly 150 world leaders gathered, delivering speeches that
were fairly interchangeable: there was much talk of ‘ambition’ and ‘the
next generation’.

Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe stood out, lambasting the West for causing
global warming, and declaring that Africa would not cut its carbon
emissions.

Then, soundbites duly issued, the leaders jetted home, leaving hundreds
of national delegates bustling from meeting to press conference to side
event, and activists exhorting them via press releases to commit to
ever-bigger carbon cuts.

Yet after two weeks of negotiations about rising temperatures, the main
thing that has risen is expectations. When a deal couldn’t be reached,
the conference was extended into ‘extra time’. Delegates talked around
the clock, agreeing the fine print for an agreement that will commit the
world to massive economic costs while doing very little for the
environment.

In a peer-reviewed research paper based on pre-conference pledges, I
measured the environmental impact of every nation fulfilling every
carbon-cutting promise between 2016 and 2030. I found that the total
temperature reduction will be just 0.048C by 2100.

Even if we assume that every one of these promises would not only be
fulfilled but extended for another 70 years (and countries don’t just
import more products from carbon polluting nations) then all the
promises made in Paris will reduce temperature rises by 0.17C by 2100.
This is very similar to a finding by scientists at the Massachusetts
Institute for Technology.

Much higher figures have been bandied about by activists, delegates and
even the United Nations’ global-warming body, the UNFCCC.

The problem is that such claims are based on a wholly unrealistic
scenario where governments do little now, then embark on incredibly
ambitious and unlikely climate change reduction policies after 2030.

This is vanishingly unlikely. The only global treaty to agree a cut in
carbon emissions – the Kyoto Protocol – failed when it was never
ratified by the US, and eventually abandoned by Canada, Russia and
Japan. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we learned that the only surefire
way to make substantial emissions cuts was to go through a major
economic recession.

Emissions dropped precipitously when the Soviet Union collapsed, and
again during the 2008 financial crisis. Understandably, this approach is
not very popular with politicians or voters.

But still the politicians make lofty carbon-cutting promises. And what
they don’t talk about is the cost. In Paris you won’t hear it mentioned
that this is likely to be the most expensive treaty in the history of
the world. If you try to cut carbon dioxide, even with an efficient
carbon tax, you end up making cheap energy more expensive and this slows
economic growth.

Energy-economic models, including the gold standard Stanford University
Energy Modelling Forum, show the EU’s GDP will have grown 1.6 per cent
less by 2030.
Dishing out solar panels is feeble - even immoral

That means the Paris agreement will cost Europe £200 billion in lost GDP
every year by 2030 – and this is if the EU enacts its regulations most
efficiently. Otherwise the cost could double to £400 billion a year. For
the United Kingdom, that could mean £50 billion lost every year. And
for the world, this bill could run from £600 billion to £1.2 trillion
per year.

Why so expensive? Because current green technology is inefficient. If it
were economically advantageous to dump fossil fuels, why would we need
to sign a treaty? Every right-thinking nation on the planet would
stampede to cut CO2.

There has been much focus in Paris on the £65 billion committed to
‘climate aid’. This includes £4 billion from the UK. Much of that money –
including the UK’s portion – is coming from cash intended for global
development. Yet climate aid is a feeble response to global challenges.

Concerned about agriculture? Then invest directly in agricultural
research and better farming technologies, not subsidising inefficient
wind turbines.

Worried about ‘extreme weather’ events? These hit the poor the hardest:
helping people out of poverty is a thousand times more effective than
relying on carbon cuts.

Nor is climate aid what the world’s poor want. A global poll of 9.7
million people shows that the citizens of the world’s poorest countries
say climate action is their lowest policy priority, behind education,
healthcare, jobs and governmental reform.

When two billion people suffer from some form of malnourishment, and it
is an underlying cause of death of 2.6 million children each year, 1.2
billion people live in extreme poverty, and 2.4 billion lack clean
drinking water and sanitation, then dishing out solar panels is a feeble
– and even immoral – response.

We can help them better, cheaper and more effectively.

However there has been some good news from Paris – and it has nothing to
do with the agreement. It’s something that was announced on the
sidelines on the first day, when Microsoft founder Bill Gates, other
wealthy individuals and about 20 governments revealed that they will
double green energy research and development.

This could put us on a pathway towards finally solving global warming. A
huge increase in spending on research and development is the most
efficient way to find new breakthrough energy technologies cheaper than
fossil fuels.

When the thousands of Paris attendees meet again for a review, maybe
they will realise that they should forget about their futile policies
that throw away trillions of pounds in lost input and invest instead in
something with a real chance of working – innovation.

But Obama still wants to send US energy use and living standards backward

Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek

Paris climate talks became frenzied, as delegates desperately tried to
salvage an agreement beyond empty promises to do something sometime
about what President Obama insists is the gravest threat to our planet,
national security and future generations.

Determined for once to lead from upfront, he took a 500-person
greenhouse gas-spewing entourage to the City of Light, to call for
preventing increasing droughts, floods, storms, island-swallowing rising
acidic ocean levels, and other disasters conjured up by alarmist
computer models.

Legally binding carbon dioxide emission targets were too contentious to
pursue. So was modifying “differentiated responsibilities,” the notion
that countries which historically caused the recent atmospheric carbon
dioxide build-up must lead in cutting their emissions, while helping
developing countries eventually do likewise, by pouring trillions of
dollars in cash and free technology into the Green Climate Fund for
supposed adaptation and compensation. Developing countries had insisted
on that massive wealth redistribution as their price for signing any
binding document.

Although China now emits far more CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG)
than the USA or EU, it refused to fast-track reducing those emissions.
China and wealthy petro-states also opposed paying into the Climate
Fund. Other major bones of contention were likewise never resolved.

Thus, in the end, what we got out of Paris is voluntary emission caps,
voluntary progress reviews, no international oversight or enforcement of
voluntary progress, and voluntary contributions to the Fund.

Of course, the entire climate cataclysm mantra is based on the claim
that carbon dioxide has replaced the solar and other powerful natural
forces that have driven climate change throughout Earth and human
history. Now, merely tweaking CO2 emissions will supposedly stabilize
climate and weather systems.

President Obama fervently believes this delusion. He will likely use the
Paris gobbledygook to say America somehow has a “moral obligation” to
set an example, by de-carbonizing, de-energizing, de-industrializing and
de-developing the United States. Thankfully, Congress and the states
will have something to say about that, because they know more
anti-fossil fuel edicts will destroy jobs and living standards,
especially for poor, working class and minority families.

The impacts would be far worse than many news stories and White House
press releases suggest. Those sources often say the proposed climate
treaty sought seek GHG reductions of 80% below predicted 2050 emission
levels. The real target proposed by the White House, EU, Germany and
Britain was 80% or more below actual 1990 levels by 2050.

Those targets meant the world would have to eliminate some 95% of the
greenhouse gases that all humanity would likely release if we reach
world population levels, economic growth and living standards projected
for 2050. The United States would likely have to slash its CO2 and GHG
reductions to zero.

Moreover, current 2050 forecasts already assume and incorporate
significant energy efficiency, de-carbonization and de-industrialization
over the next 35 years. They are not business-as-usual numbers or
extrapolations of past trends. Further fossil fuel and CO2 reductions
beyond those already incorporated into the forecasts would thus be
increasingly difficult, expensive, and indeed impossible to achieve.

As we explain in our MasterResource.org analysis, there is a strong
positive relationship between GDP and carbon-based energy consumption.
Slashing fossil energy use that far would thus require decimating
economic growth, job creation and preservation, and average per-person
incomes. In fact, average world per capita GDP would plummet from a
projected $30,600 in 2050 to a miserable $1,200 per year.

Average per capita GDP in 2050 would be less than what Americans had in
1830! Many futuristic technologies might still exist, but only wealthy
families and ruling elites could afford them.

That would be catastrophic for jobs, health and welfare in developed
countries – and lethal to millions in poor nations, who would be denied
the blessings of electricity and fossil fuels for decades to come. That
is indefensible, inhumane and immoral. And for what?

Mr. Obama and the Paris alarmists insisted that drastic GHG reductions
will hold global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 F)
above pre-industrial, post-Little Ice Age levels, since 1860. We’re
already halfway to that. And now some even claim the upper safety limit
is 1.5 degrees C (2.7 F), which would require even more draconian energy
and emission cutbacks. Otherwise we face climate and weather
calamities, they insist. It’s utter nonsense.

EPA’s own analyses suggest that its fully implemented Clean Power Plan
would bring an undetectable, irrelevant reduction of perhaps 0.02
degrees Celsius (0.05 F) in average global temperatures 85 years from
now – assuming carbon dioxide actually does drive climate change.

In the Real World, climate changes regularly, and recent climate and
weather trends and events are in line with historic experience. In fact,
average global temperatures haven’t risen in nearly two decades; no
category 3-5 hurricane has struck the USA in a record ten years;
Greenland and Antarctic ice are at record levels; and still firmly
alkaline sea levels (8.1 pH) are rising at barely seven inches per
century.

Many scientists believe the sun and other powerful natural forces may
soon usher in a new era of colder temperatures, regardless of whether
atmospheric CO2 rises above 0.04% (400 ppm). That would pose much
greater threats to human health, agriculture and prosperity (and
wildlife) than global warming.

Never forget: Fossil fuels facilitated successive industrial revolutions
and enabled billions to live better than royalty did a century ago,
average incomes to increase eleven-fold, and helped average global life
expectancy to soar from less than 30 in 1870 to 71 today.

Carbon-based energy still provides 81% of world energy, and supports $70
trillion per year in world GDP. It will supply 75-80% of global energy
for decades to come, Energy Information Administration, International
Energy Agency and other studies forecast. Carbon-based energy is
essential if we are to bring electricity to the 1.3 billion people who
still do not have it, and end the rampant poverty and lung, intestinal
and other diseases that kill millions of people in poor countries every
year.

Furthermore, thousands of coal-fired power plants are built, under
construction or in planning around the world. China and India will not
consider reducing GHG emissions until 2030, and even then it will be
voluntary and dependent on how their economies are doing. That means
atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will continue to climb, greening the
planet and spurring faster crop, forest and grassland growth.

President Obama and the 40,000 climate alarmists gathered in Paris
ignored these inconvenient realities, and whitewashed the adverse
consequences of anti-hydrocarbon policies. Even binding targets would
have minimal or illusory health, climate and environmental benefits.

Instead, they would have horrendous adverse effects on human health and
environmental quality, while doing nothing to prevent climate change or
extreme weather events. What alarmists wanted in Paris would let
unelected, unaccountable activists and bureaucrats decide which
industries, companies, workers, families, states and countries win the
Climate Hustle game, and which ones lose.

And it’s not just President Obama. He wants to slash America’s carbon
dioxide emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 – and 80% below
1990 levels by 2050! Every Democrat presidential candidate demands
similar actions: Hillary Clinton wants one-third of all US electricity
to come from wind and solar by 2027; Bernie Sanders wants 50% by 2030;
Martin O’Malley wants 100% by 2050.

Obligating the United States to slash its fossil fuel use, and send
billions of taxpayer dollars annually to dictators, bureaucrats and
crony industrialists in poor countries would be disastrous. Thank
goodness it did not happen. But we are not out of the woods yet.

Via email

Scientists criticize climate agreement

The researchers — including Kevin Anderson, director of the Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester and a
major critic of unrealistic assumptions about how easily the world can
limit warming to below 3.6 degrees — were reacting to the latest draft
agreement text, released late Thursday.

The document embraces a goal of limiting warming to well below 3.6
degrees above preindustrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the
increase to 2.7 degrees —a strengthening of goals that many scientists
and also vulnerable nations have applauded.

But the text goes on to say that this will be achieved through capping
greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible, followed by "rapid
reductions thereafter towards reaching greenhouse gas emissions
neutrality in the second half of the century."

It is the second part of this that drew the scientists’ ire. It’s not
clear that a mere peaking "as soon as possible," or "greenhouse gas
emissions neutrality" thereafter, will be enough to hit the most
ambitious climate targets, they suggested.

Rather, the researchers said, to stay within a given temperature
threshold, emissions have to be taken to zero — a word that does not
appear in the current text — and for 2.7 degrees in particular, they
need to be cut rapidly and immediately.

The current text is "not consistent with science," said Anderson.

"The frustration as a scientist at this point is that once you set that
global planetary guardrail, everything else must be consistent with that
target," added Steffen Kallbekken, research director for the Climate
Economics Unit at the University of Oslo.

Kallbekken, Anderson, and the other scientists suggested that the
language about "greenhouse gas neutrality" could open up a massive door
to so-called "negative emissions" technologies that could theoretically
remove large amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, even as humans keep
on emitting it.

If we emit too much carbon dioxide to stay within a given temperature
target, meanwhile, negative emissions technologies might theoretically
cool the planet back down again, allowing for a temporary overshoot
without too much lasting planetary harm.

However, scientists have recently been highly critical of assumptions
that we can launch these technologies on a mass scale without suffering
major side effects, such as using vast amounts of land that might
otherwise be used to grow food.

At the panel on Friday, Anderson suggested that relying on these
technologies may lead us to believe in "spurious options for the
future."

Another researcher present, Joeri Rogelj, a research scholar at the
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, is one of the few
scientists to have published a study on precisely what it would take to
keep warming below 2.7 degrees in the long term.

The current draft text’s language about "greenhouse gas neutrality," he
said, "kind of obscures the fact that global carbon dioxide emissions
will have to become zero to stabilize warming at any level."

Rogelj said the world must start reducing emissions by 2020 or earlier
to meet the goals. But the current draft’s call for merely peaking
emissions "as soon as possible" leaves vast wiggle room.

The researchers praised the inclusion of a 2.7 degree temperature
increase in the current text, along with the idea of holding warming
well below 3.6 degrees. And they emphasized that the current text could
change again by Saturday, perhaps in the direction they’re hoping for —
but also perhaps becoming weaker.

"It’s incredibly positive that world political leadership has now
recognized the science," said Kallbekken. "It has to then stay
scientifically consistent right through."

In his opening statements, President Barack Obama claimed that "there is
such a thing as being too late. And when it comes to climate change,
that hour is almost upon us."

In the midst of such self-induced high-pressure politics and the alleged
immediacy of the situation, here are a few numbers to keep in mind.

An Arbitrary Goal: 2 Degrees Celsius

The U.N.’s stated goal of the Paris conference is "to keep global
warming below 2 degrees Celsius" from preindustrial levels. But as the
Wall Street Journal reports and others have pointed out well before the
Paris talks, many scientists—including those who believe we are facing
catastrophic global warming—find the benchmark of 2 degrees Celsius
arbitrary.

Professor of climatology at University College London Mark Maslin said,
"It emerged from a political agenda, not a scientific analysis. It’s not
a sensible, rational target because the models give you a range of
possibilities, not a single answer."

In other words, the entire premise of the conference is faulty.

$100 Billion (or More)-per-Year Climate Fund

A major sticking point leading up to and during the Paris climate
conference has been a Green Climate Fund that would collect $100 billion
per year by 2020 to subsidize green energy and pay for other climate
adaptation and mitigation programs in developing nations.

Only $10.2 billion has been pledged so far ($3 billion has been promised by Obama), but that’s already $10.2 billion too much.

World Bank Group vice president and special envoy for climate change
Rachel Kyte said that "the $100 billion was picked out of the air at
Copenhagen."

Executive secretary for the U.N.’s climate change conventions Christiana
Figueres has further admitted that the $100 billion is merely a proxy
to win the trust of developing countries and that "we are talking here
about trillions of dollars that need to flow into the transformation at a
global level."

Amount of Warming Since 1998: Almost None

Even as global carbon dioxide emissions have increased, warming has
plateaued. Most scientists would agree that the Earth has experience
some warming over the past century, but there is little agreement as to
how much is attributable to human activity or if warming is even
harmful. An analysis by Judith Curry comparing five data sets of actual
global temperatures found that all but one showed that global warming is
on a break.

However, climate models have predicted far more warming than has
actually happened in the past 18 years. If models have been unable to
accurately project climate conditions ten years out, how can even
longer-term projections be depended upon to make good policy decisions?

Number of Coal Power Plants Planned Around the World: 2,440

A December report by four climate institutes found that far from
decreasing in number, over 2,000 coal power plants are planned around
the world in developing and industrialized nations. And for good
reason—coal remains an efficient, affordable, and reliable resource to
generate electricity.

It’s worth noting, too, that modern American coal power plants aren’t
the plants of a century ago (or like the ones in China today) and can
filter out 90 percent of mercury emissions and 99.8 percent of soot.

Too many politicians appear out of touch with reality, though. The U.N.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has suggested that "fossil
fuel power generation without [carbon capture and sequestration be]
phased out almost entirely by 2100" to mitigate warming.

To this end, the Obama administration’s emissions reduction commitment
to cut 28 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 further
stated that this was only a "pathway … to deep, economy-wide emission
reductions of 80 percent or more by 2050."

Amount of Warming Avoided by the Obama
Administration’s Clean Power Plan: 0.02 Degrees Celsius Over the Next 85
Years

The Clean Power Plan is at the heart of Obama’s U.N. climate commitment.
But regardless of one’s opinion of global warming, the Clean Power Plan
does next to nothing to reduce global temperatures.

Models created by the Environmental Protection Agency show that the
climate impact of the Clean Power Plan is less than 0.02 degrees Celsius
in warming avoided over the next 85 years. Meanwhile, it will be
extremely costly to American families and businesses, and particularly
so for the poor Midwestern states, which rely more heavily on coal for
electricity, and the manufacturing sector, which is on the threshold of
renewed growth brought on by the oil and gas revolution.

Obama has maneuvered to avoid Senate ratification of a treaty. But
regardless of one’s position on global warming, the Paris climate
agreement is shortsighted and a bad deal for Americans and the world’s
most vulnerable.

NASA Meteorologist and member of the Johnson Space Center Climate Group
(Ret.), Tom Wysmuller (photo) was interviewed in New York by Celestin
Ngoa Balla for the weekly Cameroon newspaper Journal Integration.

Q: Mr Wysmuller: When did you start investigating the global
climate change phenomenon and what evidence do you have to convince our
readers of the seriousness, of the rigour of your work?

Thomas Wysmuller: I’ve always had a love for Meteorology, studied
it in school, and forecasted weather at the Royal Dutch Weather Bureau
in Amsterdam, before working at NASA before, during, and after the Moon
Landings. Mathematics I helped develop while assigned to work at
Jet Engine manufacturer Pratt & Whitney is being used by most
climate scientists all over the world. In the late 1990s I started
lecturing on formation of the Ice Ages; ergo the copyright on The
Colder Side of Global Warming. I continue doing so to this day,
and am part of the NASA: The Right Climate Stuff (TRCS) group centered
at the Johnson Space Center in Houston Texas.

Q: At a recent conference in New York, you stated that after the Paris
Summit on climate change, the planet will go back to the stone age. Can
you demonstrate that to our readers?

Thomas Wysmuller: The context of that assertion was that we would revert
to Stone Age conditions if every proposal, change, and energy
destroying wish list item would be enacted as a result of the Paris
COP21 conference. It would mean that inexpensive coal generated
electricity would be barred in Africa. Third World nations would
be limited to non-utility scale wind and solar power generation. Africa,
South America, and Central America would never develop continent-wide
electrical grids, nor would be permitted to develop their own natural
resources. I could go on, but hopefully you are getting the idea!

Q: In the same vein, you are also ringing the alarm bell that behind the
Paris summit lies the real agenda of some of the great powers and of
some notorious people: reducing Earth’s population. What are your
reasons to make such a statement?

Thomas Wysmuller: Once inexpensive electrical power is denied to
those most needing it, diseases will continue taking their toll in the
Third World, decent drinking water will remain in short supply and
delivery systems for it will remain substandard compared to Europe and
North America.

Keep in mind that there are some truly misguided but well-meaning people
believing they are doing environmental good involved in COP21.
But others want to keep the Third World poor and relying on "handouts"
from the so-called "developed world."

Even our own (in my view "poor choice" as) president has declared
that: "Ultimately, if you think about all the youth that everybody
has mentioned here in Africa, if everybody is raising living standards
to the point where everybody has got a car and everybody has got air
conditioning, and everybody has got a big house, well, the planet will
boil over—unless we find new ways of producing energy".

Now this is simply false. The planet will never "…boil over,"
unless new laws of physics get invented. But keeping Africa poor will
result in more deaths resulting from not "…raising living standards."

And you should not have to wait for someone else to "…find new ways of
producing energy." What if they don’t? Does that mean that you and
your descendants should wallow in poverty?

Do NOT take our president’s statement as what the American people want for your country.

For me, I would like to see every African of driving age able to 1: Have
one or two cars, 2: Have a decent road system upon which to drive them,
3: Have Air Conditioning, 4: Have a big house or elegant apartment, 5:
Have a job making, selling, or distributing things like Air
Conditioners, Cars, Farm Equipment, or teaching others how to do just
that, and all those things that make life pleasant and a lifestyle you
can be proud of.

Q: Can you explain your statement that "global warming is not an issue that concerns Africa"?

Thomas Wysmuller: To begin: The planet’s atmosphere has not warmed for almost two decades, and that includes Africa.

If we look at the total emissions of CO2 produced by man since 1750, we
find that one third of these emissions occurred in only the last 18
years and 9 months. However, the most reliable measurements of the
Earth’s surface temperature obtained by satellites show no indication of
global warming over this period. There is no evidence to support the
claims that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are causing a sudden, dangerous
change in the Earth’s climate.

I pose the following question from time to time: Pick any day of the
year, any season. Add two degrees. Notice any difference? Enjoy life.
Save $Billions that your government wants to spend or divert on this
foolishness.

A small fraction of those same "$Billions" could develop a power grid
across all of Africa, provide cheap, reliable and clean coal-fired
electricity for all. CO2 additions would benefit the planet,
allowing more rapid plant and crop growth, while CO, Carbon particles,
and real pollutants would be controlled with modern engineering
techniques.

A competent Physicist or Meteorologist would let you know that
equatorial regions of Earth would radiate most of that added heat into
space – the colder regions would warm, but not enough to cause major ice
depletion. Recent evidence points to Antarctica gaining so much
more ice/snow so as to drop world sea levels by 0.23mm each year. Truly,
"global warming is not an issue that concerns Africa" Economic
impoverishment most certainly is!

Q: Should we fear the return of colonialism particularly in Africa?

Thomas Wysmuller: Under real colonialism, you knew from whom you
wanted to be liberated. However, "economic subjugation" is likely
even more insidious than that of your past colonial experience.

Keeping Africa from utilizing your own natural resources, keeping you
without reliable power, denying you a decent transportation
infrastructure to move goods throughout the continent, or even
withholding reliable electrical power to make those goods, is true
repression.

DON’T LET IT HAPPEN TO YOU!!!

Q: The Paris Summit organizers think that the growth of jihadism and
wars in Africa is linked to global warming. What do you think?

Thomas Wysmuller: The recent unrest in the world and attacks in
Paris "feed" this kind of thinking. In truth, poverty and lack of
food and water are the "fuel" for jihadism. This results in
destabilization attempts directed towards governments who are unable to
"cure" these societal ills. If reliable electricity would power
desalinization plants and provide water for agriculture and industry,
the attractiveness for regime destruction relied upon by jihadists would
dissipate.

Q: Is there a relationship between the warming of the oceans and the emissions of CO2?

Thomas Wysmuller: Absolutely! As the oceans warm, they
release the heavier dissolved CO2 molecules contained within them.
In fact they are responsible for almost all of the CO2 emissions added
to the atmosphere every year. Humans account for less than 4%, and
half of that is re-absorbed by either plants or the oceans each year!!!

Q: What advice would you give to the African heads of state that have
already accepted the invitation to go to the Paris Summit? Should they
refuse to sign the protocol to impose a worldwide climate policy?

Thomas Wysmuller: Go to the Paris Summit. Do NOT give up
your nation’s right to explore for, extract, utilize and develop your
natural resources.

Review any technical assistance offered, but have your own scientists
that have high integrity, analyze any offers and accept only those
that: 1: Give your nation capability that it doesn/t presently
have, 2: Contribute to your own energy independence, 3: Grant meaningful
employment for your people, 4: Improve your nation’s
infrastructure, and 5: Allow you to increase your nation’s
competitiveness in all aspects of world trade. There are many more
in addition to these 5, but starting with these, your heads of state
will earn their right to remain in their positions.

And yes, they should absolutely refuse to sign the protocol as it has
been described to me. Signing will guarantee permanent mediocrity
for those African nations that are tricked into supporting the protocol.

Q: And what message do you have for the African population who, not long
ago, heard Barack Obama tell them that it is dangerous for the planet
that every house should have electricity?

Thomas Wysmuller: Tell Barack Obama to cut power to the US White
House 20 times per day, sell his jet plane Air Force One, and get rid of
the cars that he rides in on the way to golf courses on a weekly
basis. When all of those happen, then consider that you might not
want every house having electricity, and decide that his house will be
the only one in that category.

Q: Nonetheless, the phenomenon of global warming is not a myth. And you
are saying that it has some good advantages such as creating jobs?

Thomas Wysmuller: We are in a 2 degree C plus and minus
temperature band for the past 10,000 years! 300 years ago we were
cooling. 100 years ago we started warming again. We are still in
that 2 degree C range, and not anywhere near the top of that range.

Add atmospheric CO2 and plants grow more and need less water to do
so. Satellite imagery of the Sahel region of Africa shows greening
during the 20 years after the satellites were first put in orbit.
If there is any myth, it is that of taking just the past 100 years of
temperature change and insisting that it will go on forever. Over
100 climate models have failed to accurately project the Earth’s
atmospheric temperature – and all but 3 failed on the high side because
of CO2 increase assumptions and feedbacks built into the modeler’s
assumptions.

Jobs will follow as a result of NOT following the proposed resource
development restrictions that some would impose upon your country and
delight in your continued subservience. I’m not one of them!!!

Q: The way things are going right now, some scientists fear an increase
of floods, cyclones and other natural catastrophes. Can you comment?

Thomas Wysmuller: Those scientists to whom you refer just are not
keeping up with reality. I cannot apologize for their ignorance,
but hopefully they can. There is a concept called "Accumulated
Cyclonic Energy" (ACE) and it is tracked worldwide. It takes the
energy components of storms wind speed, storm duration measured in
6-hour intervals, and area covered. This ACE statistic trend is
tracked, and for the past 15 years the trend is down, and decidedly so,
even as CO2 has risen.

Hurricanes, Cyclones, Typhoons, etc., are within their historic ranges
though not fewer in number, but this is likely due to better satellite
tracking of these systems. In areas where there is high accuracy
in storm tracking, such as the United States, numbers of Tornadoes in
all categories are either diminished or flat, none increasing!

Please keep in mind that the "catastrophes" referred to are all
"Weather" related, not "Climate" related, as "Climate" is the result of
very long term changes in the averages of many meteorological factors,
and CO2 is not the major one involved.

Q: What can explain that two weeks before the Paris summit, the
conclusions of your work and your observations are not well-known around
the world? Are there some people that don’t want your voice to be
heard?

Thomas Wysmuller: Many highly regarded and recognized scientists
with world class reputations share my outlook and have similar
opinions. I give lectures, talks and presentations all over the
world, and those conclusions that I have arrived at with others are
actually quite well known.

I am sure there are some that "…don’t want your (my) voice to be heard,"
but those are the actions of fear; fear that they will be exposed as
less than competent, and have to defend policies that damage the very
people and nations that they pretend to be helping.

Q: Can you tell us why you are not afraid to oppose the powerful nations
and powerful people (including even the Pope) who are involved in
promoting this climate change agenda? They say that that there is a
danger! Are you trying to tell us that the right of all nations to
develop, the need to create jobs, and the need for science to be
truthful, is more important than fear?

Thomas Wysmuller: Absolutely!!! And there is no "climate danger"
to worry about but there is a very real danger that lack of development,
poverty, and lack of economic opportunity present to your country and
the world!

I have easily developed a lack of fear with respect to my positions, as
they are grounded in hard science, accurate data, and a structured
approach in problem solving that I learned during my days at NASA.
Over the years I have applied my Meteorological, Mathematical, and
Earth Sciences background to my presentations, and acquired an
understanding of climate, and Ice-Age formation.

I believe my "advice" to the developing world will actually allow them
to DEVELOP!!! Rise to the level that brings the best lifestyle,
medical health, and prosperity that you can hope for and then benefit
all of humanity!!! When your nation’s intelligence and intellect
is focused on becoming equal partners in the world, the rest of the
world’s nations will welcome your inclusion in mainstream economic
progress, and I not only look forward to that day, but will work hard to
convince others to help you achieve it.

I thank you for your work in communicating my viewpoints to your
country’s leaders and your general readership. Political decisions
based upon sound science and correct information are the recipe for
national achievement, and I wish you the very best in attaining that
success!!!

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

A most interesting map. Warmists recently have been dining out on
reports of ice melting in West Antarctica generally and in the Antarctic
peninsula in particular. I have always pointed out on such
occasions that melting in one small part of Antarctica is hardly
indicative of a global process and also pointed out the probable
explanation for what is going on: Reports of vulcanism in the
area. The map above now puts the matter beyond doubt. Note
how hot the Antarctic peninsula is shown to be. It's full of volcanic
activity.

And note below that the findings are said to explain
the retreat of the Thwaite and Pine Island Pine Island glaciers --
exactly the two glaciers that Warmists have been getting erections over.
So it's all just volcanic activity! How boring and disappointing
for the Warmists. I do enjoy being proved right, though

The new
findings will not slow the Warmists down much, however. We have
long known of the Gakkel ridge in the Arctic -- a long line of active
volcanoes underneath the floating ice of the Arctic -- yet Warmists
persist in claiming that the occasional melt in the Arctic has
significance for global warming. It does not. It just
reflects the variability of volcanic activity in the Arctic. So in
both the Arctic and the Antarctic, volcanoes should be taking the
Warmists' joy away. But when you are as good at ignoring reality as the
Green/Left are, they will no doubt continue to peddle their fraudulent
claims

There is a mysterious line of volcanoes that have formed in certain
areas of Antarctica - and could hold the key to the area's future.

For years, researchers have been trying to look below the ice sheets to
find out why, but due to extreme cold their technology has not been able
to gather any answers.

Now with the assistance of ruggedized seismometers, geologists have been
able to get the first look at the mantle below the ice, revealing areas
of 'hot rock'.

This was the first time researchers had technology that was tough enough
to withstand Antarctica’s harsh weather and the first time humans eyes
have seen below this region.

A giant blob of super heated rock about 60 miles beneath Mount Sidley was seen on the map.

This is the last chain of volcanic mountains in Marie Byrd Land at one end of the transect.

What surprised researchers the most was the hot rock beneath Bentley
Subglacial Trench, a deep basin at the other end of the transect.

Mount Sidley is the southernmost mountain in a volcanic mountain range
in Marie Byrd Land, a mountainous region dotted with volcanoes near the
coast of West Antarctica.

‘A line of volcanoes hints there might be a hidden mantle plume, like a
blowtorch, beneath the plate,’said Doug Wiens, PhD, professor of earth
and planetary sciences and a co-author on the paper.

‘The volcanoes would pop up in a row as the plate moved over it.’
‘But it's a bit unclear if this is happening here,’ he said.

‘We think we know which direction the plate is moving, but the volcanic
chain is going in a different direction and two additional nearby
volcanic chains are oriented in yet other directions.’

‘If this was just a plate moving over a couple of mantle plumes, you'd
expect them to line up, as they do in the Hawaiian Islands.’

It was apparent that there was higher heat flow into the bottom of the
ice sheet in this area, regardless of the hot zone’s ill-defined shape,
according to the researchers

The West Antarctic Rift is less known, because it’s so hidden and leaves a lot of room for research and discovery.

‘We didn't know what we'd find beneath the basin,’ Wiens said.

‘For all we knew it would be old and cold.’

‘We didn't detect any earthquakes, so we don't think the rift is
currently active, but the heat suggests rifting stopped quite recently.’

The rift valley was created in the late Cretaceous period, a time of
diffuse extension, and more focused extension created deep basins like
the Bentley Subglacial Basin and the Terror Rift in the Ross Sea.

‘This period of more focused extension likely occurred in the Neogene,’ Lloyd said.

‘If it's still hot there, it might also be hot under other basins in the rift system.’

This system is known to have the most influence on ice streams in West Antarctica.

The researchers believe that seismic surveys, similar to this one, will
improve the models of the ice sheets, as the modelers require an
estimate of the heat flow and need to know what the geological
conditions at the bottom of the ice are in order to estimate drag.

In July, scientists reported the heat flow at one of these spots was
four times higher than the global average, which raised the question to
why the reading was so high. Researchers think this recent extension in
the Bentley Subglacial Trench might explain these findings.

The second issue was understanding the structure under the Thwaite and Pine Island Pine Island glaciers, which are closer to the shoreline than the Bentley Subglacial Trench.

The two glaciers have been described as the ‘weak underbelly’ of the ice
sheet because surges in the ice flow there could possibly cause the
rapid disintegration of the entire West Antarctica ice sheet.

So here we have an explanation of the recent small apparent rise in
global temperatures. If a global temperature increase this year
rises to statistical significance, it will be clear what is going
on. Ocean currents rather than global warming will be behind the
statistics. This could be roughly adjusted for in the statistics
-- by substracting the rise above surrounding years of the 1997-98 El
Niño. That calculation may never be made public, however.
The Warmists are very prolific with very dubious adjustments but they
won't like that obvious one

The current extreme El Niño is now the strongest ever recorded, smashing
the previous record from 1997-8. Already wreaking havoc on weather
around the world, the new figures mean those effects will probably get
worse. Climate change could be to blame and is known to be making the
extreme impacts of El Niño on weather more likely.

The 1997-8 El Niño killed 20,000 people and caused almost $97 billion of
damage as floods, droughts, fires, cyclones and mudslides ravaged the
world.

Now the current El Niño has surpassed the 1997-8 El Niño on a key
measure, according to the latest figures released by the US National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency.

El Niño occurs when warm water that has piled up around Australia and
Indonesia spills out east across the Pacific Ocean towards the Americas,
taking the rain with it.

A key measure of its intensity is the warmth of water in the central
Pacific. In 1997, at its peak on 26 November, it was 2.8?°C above
average. According to the latest measurements, it reached 2.8?°C on 4
November this year, and went on to hit 3.1?°C on 18 November – the
highest temperatures ever seen in this region.

"The El Niño community is closely watching the evolution [of this El
Niño] and whether the current event will surpass the 1997-8 event," says
Axel Timmerman at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu. "Monthly and
weekly central Pacific temperature anomalies clearly show that this
current event has surpassed it."

The temperatures in the central Pacific have the biggest impact on the
global atmospheric circulation, and therefore the biggest impacts on
global weather, says Timmerman, who has been warning that this El Niño
is likely to be a record-breaker.

The event hasn’t broken temperature records across the entire eastern
Pacific, but in the central eastern Pacific. "It’s shifted into an area
where most likely the atmosphere will respond even more," Timmerman
says.

Timmerman and others showed in 2013 that El Niños have been stronger in
the last few decades than in any period over the past four centuries. It
is unknown whether that’s because of climate change, but Timmerman and
colleagues have also shown that extreme impacts from El Niño’s will
double in frequency this century as a result of climate change.

In similar findings, Scott Power at the Bureau of Meteorology in
Australia and colleagues showed that climate change will amplify the way
that El Niño redistributes rainfall, making droughts and floods worse.

El Niño has been implicated in a host of extreme weather events across
the globe. Combined with global warming, it’s partly responsible for
2015 being the hottest year on record. In India, more than 2000 people
died in a heatwave caused by a delayed monsoon – an effect of El Niño.

Now the region is experiencing unusually heavy rains as the monsoon has
finally arrived – also an expected impact of El Niño. "Southern India is
having a lot of rain as it goes into winter, having come out of the dry
monsoon. This is only so during extreme El Niño, so it is a
confirmation that the El Niño is huge," says Wenju Cai at Australia’s
government scientific research body, CSIRO in Melbourne.

El Niño is also probably making record-breaking illegal fires in Indonesia worse, by reducing rainfall there.

Massive El Niño sweeping globe is now the biggest ever recorded
And in some Pacific Islands, water levels have dropped so much that
coral reefs are exposed, in a phenomenon known as Taimasa, Samoan for
"smelly reef". New Scientist has received photographs from Guam showing
this dramatic effect, only seen during extreme El Niño events. Across
the globe, the El Niño has also begun a mass coral bleaching.

Australia has dodged some of the worst effects of El Niño, as the Indian
Ocean Dipole – an oscillation of sea temperatures in the Indian Ocean –
which was amplifying El Niño, has eased off. And because of the
location of the warmest water, some regions like Peru and Ecuador are
also likely to experience fewer impacts.

But overall, Timmerman suspects that the impacts of this record-breaking El Niño will be record-breaking too.

Many of the effects are yet to come. For example, whether it will bring
rains to California and relieve the drought – or even whether it will go
too far and cause floods – isn’t yet known. Timmerman says the models
are predicting a higher chance of rain for California.

And once the El Niño is over, it might not be time for celebration,
since it’s likely to be followed by a strong La Niña, which will bring
roughly opposite effects to the world’s weather. La Nina’s are also
expected to be about twice as common as a result of climate change this
century.

China and India won't budge so any final agreement will be a paper tiger

Talks to agree a new international deal to tackle climate change are set
to overrun as many countries remain divided over the key issues.

Ministers from 195 countries worked through the night as fraught
discussions on how to phase out greenhouse gases and finance for poorer
nations continued to stall the UN's climate summit in Paris.

The talks were due to end tonight after two weeks of wrangling, but the
French foreign minister Laurent Fabius, who is chairing the summit,
conceded the talks would run in to Saturday.

He said a final version of the draft agreement will not be produced
until Saturday morning and will then be voted on by delegates.

However, many countries including China and Saudi Arabia have been refusing to yield ground on key issues within the agreement.

The conference is the last chance for 195 countries to agree on a
strategy since members agreed in 1992 to stabilise greenhouse gases 'at a
level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the
climate system.'

The text has already been slimmed down since the talks started from 43
pages to just 27 in an attempt to find compromises, but Saudi Arabia
said it would continue to oppose the text.

The latest draft, which was published on Thursday night, also sets
targets that would see countries attempt to become 'greenhouse gas
emissions neutral' in the second half of the century by shifting to
cleaner energy sources.

This was target was more ambitious than in previous texts and was
insisted after many countries such small island states and members of
the European Union pushed for more stringent commitments to emissions
cuts.

Arguments over finance deals to help poor countries cope with climate
change and adapt to low carbon economies has also been a major point of
disagreement.

The United States has said it remains opposed to any wording that might
force it to give compensation to developing nations struggling to cope
with the impacts of climate change as a result of past emissions by
developed countries.

Gurdial Sing Nijar of Malaysia, the head of a bloc of hardline countries
including India, China and Saudi Arabia, said: 'We are going
backwards.'

They have put up the fiercest resistance against attempts by the U.S.,
the European Union and other wealthy nations to make emerging economies
pitch in to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions and help the poorest
countries cope with climate change.

The issue, known as 'differentiation' in United Nations climate lingo, was expected to be one of the last to be resolved.

Nijar said it was unreasonable to expect countries like Malaysia to
rapidly shift from fossil fuels - the biggest source of man-made
greenhouse gas emissions - to cleaner sources of energy.

'We cannot just switch overnight ... and go to renewables,' he said, on a
coffee break between meetings at 1:30 am. 'If you remove
differentiation you create very serious problems for developing
countries.'

US Secretary of State John Kerry held several meetings with ministers
from around the world through the night as he attempted to haggle them
into an agreement. 'We're working on it,' said Mr Kerry as he
emerged from one meeting.

However, Matthieu Orphelin, spokesman for the Nicolas Hulot Foundation
which advises President Francois Hollande on climate change, said:
'Major countries have entrenched behind their red lines instead of
advancing on compromise.

Paris, the City of Light, which earned its moniker by being an early
adapter of natural gas to light its public spaces, is currently hosting
COP21 (the 21st Conference of the Parties) — often referred to as the UN
Climate Change Conference — that aims to end the use of fossil fuels.
There, more than 150 world leaders gathered under the guise of,
supposedly, slowing the warming of the planet.

Ask anyone on the street: "What is the big international conference on
climate change, going on right now in Paris, about?" — and, assuming you
find someone who actually knows it is happening, they will tell you it
is to stop global warming.

However, on December 4, five days into the 12-day event, Christina
Figueres, the UN’s top climate change official, made clear, that the
meeting isn’t "about the temperature" — which she said "is just a
proxy." Instead, she revealed: it "is about the decarbonisation of the
economy" — which means ending the use of fossil fuels, such as natural
gas, oil, and coal.

No wonder, this year, the world leaders wanted to speak on the opening
day of the conference — before the messaging got muddled by comments
such as Figueres’. At the start of the show, they could wax eloquent
instead of being embarrassed by the meetings’ eventual failure to
produce the touted deal. Each world leader was given three minutes to
speak. All followed the rules and stayed within the limited timeframe —
except for President Obama. In an incredible show of hubris, he
over-spoke by nearly five times what he was allotted and ignored the
frequent beeps designed to signal that time is up.

What did he have to say that required 14 minutes of prepared remarks?

Apparently, if he’d been honest about the "decarbonisation" goal, he
wouldn’t get the needed cooperation of countries like India and China —
which are continuing to build new coal-fueled power plants at an
alarming rate and which intend to remain reliant on fossil fuels for the
foreseeable future. Instead Obama’s speech was filled with hyperbole
and distortions such as these:

"The sea is already swallowing villages"

The above statement is referencing his trip recent to Alaska and likely
is describing Kivalina — a village of indigenous people that he flew
over on Air Force One. It is located on a barrier Island, a spit of land
not reachable by road. By nature, barrier beaches, islands and other
ephemeral structures are constantly changing. For example, in the 1990s
the National Park Service had to move the iconic Hatteras Lighthouse
because its barrier island had moved away from the ocean and towards the
sound side; this migration of the Outer Banks has been ongoing the last
10,000 years—long before any talk of "climate change."

Despite increasing CO2 levels, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration tide gauge station closest to Kivalina is in Nome, AK. It
shows no sea level rise in that part of Alaska. Kivalina may face
changes due to nature, but not because of fossil fuels.

"Glaciers are melting at a pace unprecedented in modern times"

During his Alaska trip, Obama visited Exit Glacier, near Seward.
Historians, geologists, Park employees, and glaciologists have been
keeping track of glaciers for hundreds of years, and the records for
Exit Glacier are no exception. The records show for more than 100 years,
Exit Glacier has been retreating, but the maximum retreat rate was 300
feet per year in 1918. Last year Exit Glacier retreated a mere 187 feet.
Near Exit Glacier, at Seward Alaska, sea levels, as measured by the
tide gage there, are actually falling.

Similarly, in Glacier Bay — which Obama didn’t see, but cruise ships
frequent — retreat has slowed from its peak in the 1860s.

"Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields that no longer grow"

Here, based on later comments, we can guess that he is referring to the
coral islands of the Pacific. However, researchers J. R. Houston and R.
G. Dean examined 57 tide gauges: East, Gulf, West, Alaskan, Aleutian and
Island having 100-year-long periods of record and they show no late
20th century acceleration of sea level rise. Additionally, recent
research confirms that of Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle in the 1830s:
corals keep up with rising seas. In July 2014, Science Magazine
published a report titled: "Warming may not swamp islands." It states:
"Studies suggest that atoll islands will rise in step with a rising
sea."

Regarding his "fields that no longer grow" comment, we’ve seen historic
records of changing patterns of coastlines and abandoned lands. One such
example is found in the 1897 National Geographic magazine. It makes
clear that before the establishment of the Mississippi channel and
building of levees, and because of the natural sinking of the
Mississippi Delta, the Mississippi overflowed every spring, spreading
fresh sediment on the land. Construction of the levees brought that
process to a halt. It states: "It is a fact well known to people living
in the delta of Mississippi that large tracts of land were long ago
abandoned in consequence of overflow by Gulf waters, due to the sinking
of the lands."

These three examples are just a sampling of the extreme statements Obama
offered in his 14-minute opening speech that was filled with soaring
rhetoric and scary statements. Had he stuck to his three-minute
timeframe, he might have had to acknowledge that temperature is just a
proxy. What this is really about, as Figueres revealed at COP18, is "a
complete transformation of the economic structure of the world."

Early this year, Figueres restated the same basic ideas: "This is the
first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the
task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the
economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150
years, since the Industrial Revolution."

But that would be a tough sell, maybe not at the meeting in the City of
Light, but to average Americans who aren’t looking for a complete
transformation of the structure of the world — which sounds a lot like
the goal of ISIS and its terrorist allies.

Maybe climate change, or, more accurately, the proposed cure, is the biggest threat facing the world today.

Leaders from around the world, including President Barack Obama, have
been saying that the COP21, also known as the Paris climate conference,
is the last best hope to save the planet from catastrophic warming.
Evidence and observed data, however, suggest otherwise.

History shows us that this isn’t the only time international leaders
have cried that the sky is falling when it comes to global warming.

French President François Hollande said last week that "[n]ever have the
stakes of an international meeting been so high, since what is at stake
is the future of the planet, the future of life."

Obama echoed those sentiments in his opening remarks, claiming that
"there is such a thing as being too late. And when it comes to climate
change, that hour is almost upon us."

In 2011 in Durban, Rev. Dr. Olav Fykse Tveit, the World Council of
Churches general secretary, called the United Nations UNFCCC COP17
meeting the "last opportunity for the international community to be
responsible in addressing climate change."

At the 2009 United Nations global warming conference in Copenhagen, former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said:

If we do not reach a deal at this time, let us be in
no doubt: once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no
retrospective global agreement in some future period can undo that
choice. By then it will be irretrievably too late.

Stavros Dimas, European Union environment minister, warned the world
that "Copenhagen [is] the world’s last chance to stop climate change
before it passes the point of no return."

Philip Clapp, head of the Washington-based National Environment Trust,
said that 2007 was the imperative deadline for countries to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions: "The scientists are telling us that this is
the world’s last shot at avoiding the worst consequences of global
warming."

You get the point.

Virtually every international global warming summit has been deemed the
last chance for the world. Dismissing problems of world poverty, hunger,
disease, and terrorism, leaders have claimed that climate change is the
world’s greatest problem.

The climate data simply does not suggest that man-made global warming
should be at the top of the list of concerns. The climate models
international bodies are using to justify regulations and commitments to
restrict the use of affordable energy to reduce carbon dioxide are
over-predicting warming.

As climatologists Patrick Michaels and Paul Knappengerger note:

"Recent climate change literature has been dominated
by studies which show that the equilibrium climate sensitivity is better
constrained than the latest estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change (IPCC) and the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA)
and that the best estimate of the climate sensitivity is considerably
lower than the climate model ensemble average. From the recent
literature, the central estimate of the equilibrium climate sensitivity
is ~2°C, while the climate model average is ~3.2°C, or an equilibrium
climate sensitivity that is some 40 percent lower than the model
average".

Even studies that have attempted to refute the 18-year pause in global
warming show that the temperature trend is much less than that projected
by climate models. And even though man-made greenhouse gas emissions
have increased, the world has not experienced trends in the increased
frequency or magnitude of extreme weather events.

Although the media and international leaders have hyped the Paris
climate conference as the last chance to save the planet, 2015 is not
very different from most of years’ worth of failed negotiations.

What is different in 2015 compared to past years is that the Obama
administration is unilaterally imposing carbon dioxide regulations on
America’s energy sector. The administration’s regulations on new and
existing power plants are perhaps the most harmful example of Obama’s
push to regulate CO2.

The regulations will drastically shift the energy economy away from
coal, which provides approximately 40 percent of America’s electricity.
Restricting the use of that affordable, reliable energy supply will
raise electricity rates, and those higher prices will reverberate
through the economy, resulting in hundreds of thousands of jobs lost and
tens of thousands of dollars lost for American households.

When it comes to global warming, the sky isn’t falling.

But if the administration continues to drive up energy costs for
families and businesses with top-down climate regulations, economic
growth and the rate of employment certainly will fall.

Companies dedicated to capturing carbon from power plants and storing it underground.

The list is certainly exhaustive. The problem with all of them, however,
is that they’re in Paris pushing for special privileges that will help
their businesses at the expense of their competitors and at the expense
of a competitive free market.

It doesn’t matter what policies are advocated for – subsidies for carbon
free energy technologies, a Green Climate Fund that finances green
projects in developing countries, regulations that restrict the use of
carbon-emitting natural resources or a carbon tax – those with special
connections will benefit and the costs will be dispersed among the rest
of us.

These are policies that will cost American households and businesses –
at least those businesses not connected to politicians and bureaucrats –
leading to lower levels of output, income and employment.

Because more than 80 percent of America and the world’s energy needs are
met through carbon-emitting conventional fuels like natural gas and
coal, reducing CO2 emissions will increase energy prices and force
consumers to use less.

In addition to the direct budget impact of higher costs for electricity,
gasoline, heating oil, and natural gas, higher energy costs force
cutbacks in both the production and consumption of all goods and
services because energy is a staple input for the economy. The ultimate
result is economic retraction and a reduction in living standards.

Crony policies that favor the well connected do more harm than the
direct higher prices we pay. They harm competition and skew how markets
should work. Businesses can and should take advantage of emerging
markets and innovate to provide products people want.

That’s not what’s going on in Paris.

Companies here are bent on crafting policies with the government and
international bodies that would direct taxpayer money and private
investment toward their projects. Private investment dollars will follow
taxpayer-funded, subsidized projects because those government programs
reduce the financial risk. Those are private investment dollars that
can’t be spent on other potentially promising ideas. The result is a
system that rewards what the government wants rather than what the
market would produce, crippling innovation, competition and growth.

There also have been calls for energy policy reform and energy subsidy
reform here in Paris, but even those calls are off base. They continue
to get it wrong by calling for the end to subsidies for conventional
resources like oil, coal and natural gas and pouring more money into
intermittent, expensive renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

True policy and subsidy reform would eliminate preferential treatment
for all energy sources and technologies and get the federal government
and international bodies like the United Nations out of the energy
businesses altogether.

The world has a diverse mix of energy producers and suppliers and the
demand for affordable and reliable electricity and transportation fuel
isn’t going anywhere any time soon. They don’t need help; they need
bureaucrats to get out of the way. Only then will we eliminate cronyism
in energy policy, encourage innovation, and have the resources to
protect the environment

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

11 December, 2015

Obama’s Ridiculous History Lessons on Climate Change

President Barack Obama last week tried to give us a history lesson on
climate change. "As human beings are placed under strain, then bad
things happen," he said. "And, you know, if you look at world history,
whenever people are desperate, when people start lacking food, when
people are not able to make a living or take care of their families,
that’s when ideologies arise that are dangerous."

Welcome to leaps in logic that would span the Grand Canyon. Apparently
excruciatingly slow, contradictory, and sometimes nearly imperceptible
changes in the atmosphere’s temperature are capable of spawning
ideologies like communism, fascism, and now Islamic jihadism, although
the president won’t use that term. Never mind all those historical
details about what actually caused these ideologies to rise—social
upheavals like industrialization, philosophical disputes unleashed by
the Enlightenment, and the crises inside Islam. The president has got it
figured out.

Never to be left out in doubling down on a bad idea, the president’s
national security adviser, Susan Rice, jumped into the fray. She blames
the Syrian civil war on climate change.

This would come as a great surprise to protesters who in March 2011
found themselves fired upon by Assad’s security forces. They were not
the slightest bit interested in the drought that Rice and others argue
caused the war.

Protesters were asking not for water, but for democracy, and as any
college sophomore would know, the unrest that gave rise to the conflict
was caused not by dry weather, but by Assad’s oppression.

If you don’t believe me, take it from the co-author of the report that
spawned the "climate change did it" theory of the Syrian war, Richard
Seager. After arguing that global warming made the offending Syrian
drought worse, he quickly adds, "We’re not saying the drought caused the
[Syrian] war."

Indeed it didn’t, because that would be preposterous.

And yet that is precisely what Rice would want you to believe. Seager
may cover himself with a categorical denial after the fact, but he,
Rice, and others like them know that their supporters will pick up their
true meaning.

Such leaps in logic have a name. It is called sophistry.

Vague statements about what the "science" supposedly means hang out
there as mere suggestions, to be denied or embraced depending on how
useful they are to the political agenda. That’s the literal meaning of
sophistry: the use of subtly deceptive argumentation to make a falsehood
sound true—otherwise, and crudely, known as a lie.

Can there be any question as to why so many people are so skeptical of
claims made by climate change advocates? Instead of a cautious
scientific method, we get alarmism and wild speculations that cannot be
supported by the facts.

I suggest that the president take some courses in history and logic.
Somehow he must have missed them at Columbia. If he doesn’t want to do
that, then perhaps he can at least spare us the inane world history
lessons.

One week into the Paris climate change negotiations, and it’s now
doubtful whether President Barack Obama will be able to make good on his
promise to provide billions of dollars to the "Green Climate Fund." The
goal of this fund is to give U.S. taxpayer dollars to poorer nations in
order to subsidize their climate programs.

During a press conference at the Paris Climate Conference (COP21), Todd
Stern, Obama’s chief climate negotiator, was asked about congressional
opposition to the Green Climate Fund. Stern could only say, "For this
[budget] year we’re seeking $500 million, and I hope we can get as close
to it as we can, but we don’t know yet."

Ten Democrat U.S. senators flew over to Paris and held their own press
conference, but not one of them addressed the funding issue.

This is understandable, as climate change alarmists in the White House
and the Senate don’t have a good answer to the significant opposition
within Congress for the climate fund. Thirty-seven Republican senators
have already pledged "that Congress will not allow U.S. taxpayer dollars
to go to the Green Climate Fund until the forthcoming international
climate agreement is submitted to the Senate for its constitutional
advice and consent."

On the House side, 110 members have likewise pledged to block budget
requests for the Green Climate Fund unless the Paris agreement is
brought to Congress for its approval.

This is a significant embarrassment for the president’s negotiating team
in Paris, since it is clear to all present here that the "developing"
nations of the world will not agree to anything unless they are
guaranteed the billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars that they have been
promised.

Unlike under the terms of the 1997 Kyoto climate protocol, developing
countries are now pledging to reduce their carbon emissions—but only if
they are provided the financing and technology to do so. And any
projects they take on to adapt to the climate change already occurring
must also be underwritten by the world’s wealthy nations.

So while it has become clear that Obama fully intends to bypass Congress
on the Paris agreement, he has no choice but to go to Congress with his
begging bowl for the billions of dollars he needs to fund the Green
Climate Fund.

Given the current political climate in Washington, D.C., the world’s
developing countries that are in attendance at the Paris Climate
Conference should take the Obama administration’s assurances of climate
funding with a very large grain of salt.

The U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) claims that climate change
will cause the disappearance of the glaciers in Montana’s Glacier
National Park in just 20 years.

"Climate change affects every corner of the American continent," the DOI
website stated. "It is making droughts drier and longer, floods more
dangerous and hurricanes more severe.

"The glaciers in Montana's Glacier National Park are melting so quickly,
they’re expected to disappear in the next two decades," the website
stated, although no documentation is provided to substantiate that
claim.

The section of the DOI website dedicated to climate change also reveals
how much of the land in the United States and its resources are
controlled by the federal government: "one-fifth of the land in the
country, 35,000 miles of coastline, and 1.76 billion acres of the Outer
Continental Shelf."

"The impacts of climate change are forcing us to change how we manage
these resources," the website stated. "Climate change may dramatically
affect water supplies in certain watersheds, impact coastal wetlands and
barrier islands, cause relocation of and stress on wildlife, increase
wildland fires, further spread invasive species, and more."

The DOI’s National Park Service (NPS) website also described the more than one million acre park:

"Glacier National Park is not named so much for its small glaciers, but
for the colossal work of colossal glaciers in the past," the NPS website
stated. "Ten thousand years ago, the topography of Glacier looked much
the same as it does today."

The NPS website also predicted the end of glaciers at the park in just 15 years.

"Since the last ice age ended, around 10,000 years ago, there have been
many slight climate fluctuations that have been mirrored by the growth
or recession of glaciers," the NPS website stated. "Based on current
trends, however, glacier recession models predict that by 2030, Glacier
National Park will be without glaciers."

The NPS website also credited weather for the diversity of plants and animals in the park.

"Glacier Park's varied climate influences and its location at the
headwaters of the Pacific, Atlantic and Hudson Bay drainages have given
rise to an incredible variety of plants and animals," the website
stated. "Its diverse habitats are home to nearly 70 species of mammals
including the grizzly bear, wolverine, gray wolf and lynx.

"Over 270 species of birds visit or reside in the park, including such
varied species as harlequin ducks, dippers and golden eagles," the
website stated.

The NPS website also tells potential visitors about how unpredictable the weather is at the park.

"Weather is always unpredictable in the mountains," the website stated. "Be prepared for all types of weather!"

At UN Climate Conference, Placating China More Important Than Including a Big Polluter

The United Nations and its member states may be engrossed in the drive
to achieve a new global climate agreement in Paris this week, but not to
the extent that they are willing to challenge China’s decades-old
refusal to allow Taiwan to be treated as a normal country.

Taiwan – a thriving, independent democracy of 23 million which Beijing
regards as a renegade province – has been excluded from participation as
a state in the U.N. climate conference despite the much-touted urgency
about reaching a global deal.

Rather than have a national delegation at the talks, as almost 200 other
countries do, Taiwan has sent a team that is attending in the capacity
of a non-governmental organization, unable to participate in the talks
officially – or even as an observer state.

Taiwan’s exclusion comes despite the fact it is a relatively big emitter of the "greenhouse gases" blamed for climate change.

According to the latest available data from the Carbon Dioxide
Information Analysis Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Taiwan is
the 25th biggest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2) resulting from
"fossil-fuel burning, cement production, and gas flaring."

That puts it ahead of more than half of the specified developed nations
whose contributions to CO2 emissions were considered grievous enough to
have emission-reduction targets set under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

On the other hand, Taiwan as an island nation is allegedly susceptible
to rising sea levels which the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change blames on climate change, particularly in lower-lying western
parts of the island where the population centers are located.

The COP21 talks in Paris – the 21st Conference of the Parties to the
U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – aim to forge a
new global agreement to replace the Kyoto Protocol – by a Friday
deadline.

Eager to be part of the international effort, the Taiwanese government,
like other countries, offered a climate action plan, a so-called
"intended nationally determined contribution," ahead of the conference.

But it was not allowed to formally submit its INDC – which as a result
does not appear on the UNFCCC’s INDC list – and the U.N. has not
permitted it to take a seat at the negotiating table.

In 1971 the U.N. General Assembly expelled Taiwan and gave its seat the
communist People’s Republic of China. Taiwan’s attempts since 1993 to
rejoin the world body have been blocked by Beijing and its allies.

China says that granting Taiwan legitimacy in the international arena
would violate its "one China" principle and – in a phrase used when
Taiwan tried to participate in a previous U.N. climate conference, in
Copenhagen six years ago – "hurt the feelings of the 1.3 billion Chinese
people."

"Taiwan is ready, willing and able to make meaningful contributions to
tackle climate change as an observer to the UNFCCC," Taiwan’s foreign
ministry in Taipei pointed out in a recent edition of its Taiwan Review
publication. "As climate change is a global problem, all the nations of
the world must work together to achieve a global solution."

Speaking at a forum on the sidelines of the COP21 on Monday, the head of
Taiwan’s Environmental Protection Administration (EPA), Wei Kuo-yen,
called again for the UNFCCC to include it in the fight to combat climate
change.

"Obviously, Taiwan has disappeared from the INDC map," Taiwan’s official
Central News Agency quoted him as saying. "With such intentional
blindness in the international community, it is ironic that one cannot
see the real existence of Taiwan in the U.N.’s bright meeting rooms."

Despite the UNFCCC snub, Wei launched an initiative in Paris last
weekend aimed at helping countries in the region deal with the effects
of climate change – the Pan-Pacific Adaptation on Climate Change
(PPACC).

If alarmists get what they want at the climate gabfest, the consequences will be disastrous

Paul Driessen

The Senate will not approve or appropriate money for anything President
Obama might agree to in Paris, and developing countries will not (and
should not) stop building coal-fired power plants and using fossil fuels
to lift billions out of abject poverty. However, we cannot let down our
guard.

Mr. Obama will do everything possible to go around Congress and impose
more Executive Branch anti-hydrocarbon edicts, to get a hypothetical,
undetectable 0.05 degree reduction in average global temperatures 85
years from now. Meanwhile, the $1.5-trillion-per-year Climate
Crisis Industry is determined to protect its money train, redistribute
the world’s wealth, and increase its power over our lives, livelihoods
and living standards. That means the mischief afoot in Paris will never
stay in Paris.

The vast majority of the 40,000 attending the climate gabfest are
alarmists, who have their time and lavish expenses paid by taxpayers or
corporate cronies. But they still want to silence the few "dangerous
manmade global warming" skeptics who have been able to attend the event
on their own nickel. They want to revoke our conference credentials …
and prosecute us as "racketeers" and "climate criminals" – when the real
criminals are the alarmists, who are committing crimes against humanity
and our planet.

They use climate chaos claims to justify spending countless billions of
dollars annually for biased, pseudo-scientific research. They then use
that "research" to justify programs that convert croplands into ethanol
plantations, raising food and food aid costs, and leaving more people
starving longer – and convert habitats into wind farms and solar
facilities, to slaughter birds and bats by the millions;.

Alarmist policies cause numerous deaths every year from lung, intestinal
and other diseases due to an absence of electricity, refrigeration and
safe drinking water, and Western governments and banks refusing to
provide financial support for power plants. It’s not fossil fuels that
kill. It’s the absence of fossil fuels.

Unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats and their radical environmentalist
allies in the EPA, UN and EU want to de-carbonize, de-industrialize and
de-develop rich countries – and tell poor countries what level of
development and "sustainable" living standards their families will be
permitted to enjoy.

Meanwhile, Malaysian representative Gurdial Singh Nijar told the 40,000
attendees: "You [developed countries] grew to this level of prosperity
because you burned fossil fuels at an unabated rate. You created the
[climate] problem." India Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar has
bluntly said "the bill for climate action for the world is not just $100
billion. It is in trillions of dollars per year." To be paid by
countries that climate policies will make less developed, less rich and
less employed every year!

So first, the bill for WHAT problem, exactly? White House press
releases, COP21 climate conference speeches and climate computer models
are not evidence – especially when real-world events completely
contradict the Climate Hustle and Hype. Global temperatures haven’t
risen in 19 years. Greenland and Antarctic ice caps are growing, not
shrinking. Sea levels are rising at barely seven inches per century.
Oceans are firmly alkaline, not acidic. Hurricane and tornado activity
is below historic averages.

So before alarmists say another word about responsibility, prevention,
reparation and compensation, they need to prove that real-world climate
disasters and extreme weather events from the past few decades are due
to humans and fossil fuel emissions – instead of natural forces and
fluctuations. They need to prove that those events are unprecedented –
beyond what humanity has had to deal with in the past.

Most of all, they need to do it in a full-throated debate, where they
have to defend their claims, data and studies in the open – and be
questioned, challenged and cross-examined by experts from our side.

Second, fossil fuels power technologies that have lifted billions out of
poverty, disease and despair … and that poor developing nations are now
using to do the same. Developed countries burn fossil fuels to create
and manufacture those technologies. Do poor countries want them or not?
They can’t have it both ways.

Third, what Mr. Obama and climate alarmists at the 21st Conference of
Parties (COP21) in Paris are trying to impose on the world should chill
rational people to the bone.

The president has unilaterally "pledged" that the United States will
slash its carbon dioxide emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 –
even after America already reduced those plant-fertilizing emissions
significantly since 1990. The impact on poor, working class and minority
families will be disastrous, but he and his bureaucracy and Big Green
allies don’t give a spotted owl hoot.

Now, on top of that, they and the alarmists gathered in Paris have
prepared a draft climate treaty that really will "fundamentally
transform" the United States and industrialized world, just as President
Obama promised he would do. You can find the full text of the draft
COP21 agreement here, in obtuse UN-speak – and the Committee For A
Constructive Tomorrow’s plain-language analysis here. The Heartland
Institute provides extensive additional realism here, addressing climate
change and the Paris process.

Most developed countries want binding commitments by all nations: that
they will reach specified CO2 reduction targets by specific dates. The
huge coalition of "Like-Minded Developing Countries," led by China and
India, want nonbinding commitments, or no commitments. They will agree
only to do their best to cap their emissions by around 2030, and then
gradually reduce them as their economies improve and their power plants,
factories and cars become more efficient, less polluting, less
CO2-emitting.

This is called "differentiated responsibilities." It means CO2 reduction
commitments will apply only to already developed nations, which may
also be subject to a new International Tribunal of Climate Justice.
Currently rich countries will also have to provide additional "justice"
in the form of cash: $100 billion a year to begin with, then 1% of GDP
(which would be some $167 billion per year for the USA alone), plus
billions more in free technology – to cover alleged climate adaptation
costs, reparations for past climate damages, and "losses and damages"
from extreme weather events caused (solely) by now-rich countries.

The theory, the claim, the delusion – the money-grubbing, power-grabbing
pretense – behind all of this is that controlling FRC (Formerly Rich
Country) CO2 emissions will somehow hold the projected global
temperature increase to 1.5 or 2.0 degrees Celsius (2.7 or 3.6 deg F).
In other words, alarmists want us to believe that carbon dioxide now
functions as Earth’s thermostat and weather control system, even though
it represents barely 0.040% of the atmosphere (argon is 0.93% and oxygen
is 20%).

Just as absurd, this is supposed to happen even if poor countries
continue building coal-fired power plants, driving more cars, emitting
more greenhouse gases, and increasing atmospheric CO2 to perhaps 0.05%
(500 ppm), from its pre-industrial level of around 0.028% (280 ppm).

All this may happen in Fantasy Land computer models. It doesn’t and won’t happen in the Real World.

Climate Chaos Theory also absurdly assumes that any global average
temperature increase above 2 deg C will somehow be cataclysmic – even
though a warmer planet with more CO2 in the air will greatly improve
forest, grassland, algae and crop growth. And all this nonsense is
driving the Paris insanity.

Nevertheless, President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are
determined to lock the United States into this Iran-2 deal – legally,
"morally" or just because they signed it. It’s all part of their latest
apology tour: America’s mea culpa for having used fossil fuels to
improve lives all over the world.

When will the insanities cease? Speak out. Help Paris collapse like the house of cards it is.

Via email

Australia concerned over draft climate deal

Australia has 'serious concerns' over the latest form of a global
climate agreement, with Foreign Minister Julie Bishop warning of a
challenging few days ahead in Paris.

A new draft agreement was revealed on Wednesday at the United Nations
climate change conference, with no clear landing point on key hurdles of
finance, ambition and differentiation.

Ms Bishop warned the document was a long way from attracting her signature.

Australia's environment ambassador Peter Woolcott - speaking on behalf a
negotiating block of developed countries - told the conference the
group had serious concerns about the text. 'We are deeply disappointed
at the weakening of several provisions,' he said on Wednesday night.

'As we move forward we must avoid a situation where, in an effort to
reach consensus, we strip the Paris outcome of its ability to be a
genuine step change.'

It comes as the United States joined around 100 countries in a new
alliance dubbed the high ambition coalition which vows to strengthen
Wednesday's draft.

Marshall Islands Foreign Minister Tony de Brum said the coalition
comprised countries big and small, rich and poor and would not be
trading off any demands. 'We will not accept a minimalist or barebones
agreement,' he told media on Wednesday night.

The coalition is calling for five yearly reviews of country emissions
pledges, adequate climate finance for poor countries and a clear pathway
to a low-carbon future. It also wants recognition of an ambition to
limit global warming to 1.5C - below the 2C target accepted by most
developed countries.

Australia isn't in the coalition and Ms Bishop couldn't confirm if it
had been invited. 'I'll have to check on that, we've got so many
invitations to so many events and so many groupings,' she told reporters
in Paris.

She remains optimistic 196 parties will walk away with a strong
agreement at the end of the talks but warns it won't be an easy road.
'Clearly, this is the beginning of the end of the negotiations and
there's still a lot of work to be done,' she said. 'Our negotiators are
working through the night.'

There's still disagreement on who should do what, with an option still
in the draft agreement to hold only rich countries to account on
action. Australia opposes that option, calling for each country to
do its part to curb global emissions. 'All countries need to take
action and there should be a level playing field,' Ms Bishop said.

Earlier, the foreign minister flagged Australia's intention to sign onto
a New Zealand-led initiative to boost transparency and integrity of
international carbon markets.

Australia doesn't use international units, but Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull has flagged it as an option when domestic climate policies are
reviewed in 2017.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

10 December, 2015

Climate non-change: Global carbon dioxide emissions stall for second year in a row

This is a horror story for the Warmists. What if CO2 levels
stabilize naturally? What would be left for Warmists to do? What
if nature stabilizes CO2 levels without any sacrifice from people?
How then could Warmists justify all their calls for economic
upheaval? So they are frantically trying to blame China and
anything else they can think of to create the impression that this
"pause" is temporary too.

Blaming China is an act of
desperation. China is just one part of the world and the world as a
whole has been undergoing steady if slow economic growth in recent
years. And eonomic growth means increased enegy demands, which are
still almost entirely met by burning hydrocarbons -- coal, oil and
gas. And burning hydrocarbons gives off CO2. So the GLOBAL
output of CO2 from human activity has to have been going up.

So
what is going on? How come mankind has been at least as naughty as
ever but CO2 has stopped rising? What it clearly shows is that
human emissions are totally trivial in the overall CO2 budget. The big
influences on CO2 levels are natural -- NON-anthropogenic.

So why
have CO2 levels stopped rising? Probably because the oceans have
stopped outgassing. And why is that happening? Probably
because the stasis in surface temperatures over the last 18 years has
now worked its way through to the ocean deeps. They had been warmed by
the increased surface temperatures of the '80s and '90s but have
now gradually released the gas that was incompatible with those
temperatures. And with no new warming in the 21st century, they have
reached an equilibrium between their temperature and their gas content

Time will tell if that is so

The underlying journal article appears to be this one
-- an article written by Uncle Tom Cobley and All. It seems to be
a compilation of "national" CO2 emissions but I note this sentence "The
global atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured directly". In
other words measurement from observatories like Mauna Loa and Cape Grim
were used to get the overall CO2 numbers that are stirring the
pot. So all the talk about national emissions is just persiflage, a
largely irrelevant distraction.

National emissions are of
course very rubbery numbers. As the same authors say: "CO2
emissions from fossil fuels and industry (EFF) are based on energy
statistics and cement production data, while emissions from land-use
change (ELUC), mainly deforestation, are based on combined evidence from
land-cover-change data, fire activity associated with deforestation,
and models"

Global emissions of carbon dioxide this year have stalled for the second
year in a row, but scientists have warned that this does not mean the
world has reached "peak carbon" with greenhouse gases set to fall year
on year.

Latest figures on fossil-fuel emissions for 2015 show for the first time
during a period of global economic growth that the amount of carbon
dioxide being pumped into the atmosphere has remained stable for two
consecutive years.

Scientists believe however that the unprecedented decline is almost
entirely due to the economic slowdown in China, now the world’s single
biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, which is likely to see a rapid
return to growth in carbon emissions as its energy-hungry economy picks
up again.

India and other developing nations are also expected to increase the
amount of coal they burn in the coming years. This is likely to feed in
to an overall increase in the growth in global carbon emissions
globally, making the current slowdown a transitory "blip", the
scientists said.

"With two years of untypical emissions growth, it looks like the
trajectory of global emissions might have changed temporarily," said
Professor Corinne Le Quéré, director of the Tyndall Centre at the
University of East Anglia, a lead author of the study presented at the
Paris conference on climate change.

"It is unlikely that emissions have peaked for good. This is because
energy needs for growing economies still rely primarily on coal, and
emissions decreases in some industrial countries are still modest at
best," Professor Le Quéré said.

"Global emissions need to decrease to near zero to achieve climate
stabilisation. We are still emitting massive amounts of CO2 annually,
around 35 billion tonnes from fossil fuels and industry alone. There is
still a long way to near zero emissions," she said.

Carbon emissions for 2014 grew by just 0.6 per cent compared to an
average annual increase of between 2 and 3 per cent since 2000, apart
from a brief period of decline in 2009, explained by the worldwide
economic recession leading to a fall in energy demand.

The latest figures for 2015 indicate that decline in emissions has
continued with the amount of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere
this year compared to the previous year ranging from a slight rise of
0.5 per cent to a decline of 1.6 per cent.

"It’s encouraging in a way. It’s a bit of fresh air, but I don’t think
this is the peak in terms of carbon emissions. We may see a lot of flat
growth, depending on China, but India has incredible energy needs and
they are growing rapidly," Professor Le Quéré told The Independent.

"It will be a real possibility that we will see Indian growth picking up
and so allowing emissions globally to grow rapidly. India now is where
China was in the 1990s. This is why Paris is so critical," she said.

The emissions figures, published simultaneously in the journals Nature
Climate Change and Earth System Science Data, show that China was the
biggest CO2 emitter in 2014, releasing some 9.7 billion tonnes. Last
year China experienced an increase in emissions growth of 1.2 per cent,
compared to an annual growth rate of 6.7 per cent for the previous
decade.

The US was the second biggest emitter in 2014, releasing 5.6 billion
tonnes, followed by the EU and India with 3.4 billion tonnes and 2.6
billion tonnes respectively.

The UK released 0.43 tonnes of CO2 in 2014, which was 1.2 per cent of
the world total, a decrease of 9 per cent on the previous year, and 28
per cent below 1990 levels.

Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University said that global temperatures
respond to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – not
the rate of emissions in any given year – nevertheless, the latest
figures are encouraging.

"Is this the beginning of the end of global warming? Probably not. But let’s hope it is the end of the beginning," he said.

Professor David Reay of the University of Edinburgh, said: "There is a
long, long way still to go. To stay within the 2C global warming target
emissions can't just stall, they need to fall. Whether 2015 is the year
we truly turn the corner on global emissions or is just a blip in the
upward march towards dangerous climate change now depends on Paris."

Then the police turned up and in characteristic no-nonsense French style
forced the protestors to disperse before the stars – including 92-year
old rocket scientist Fred Singer and Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore
– in black tie arrived in their stretch limos and walked up the red
carpet.

It was the perfect launch for Marc Morano’s climate skeptical movie
Climate Hustle – the skeptics’ long-awaited answer to Al Gore’s An
Inconvenient Truth – which staged its triumphant world premiere in Paris
last night.

The protestors had come fresh from the COP21 climate conference, alerted
by Wanted posters plastered by activists over the streets of central
Paris warning them that seven of the world’s most evil fossil fuel
lobbyists were in town to disrupt their holy mission to bomb the global
economy back to the dark ages with carbon reductions, regulations and
wealth redistribution.

In fact though – an irony lost on the protestors: they really don’t do
irony, these people – it was the greenies who were doing all the
disrupting.

Earlier in the day they’d tried to sabotage a conference of climate
skeptics being hosted in central Paris by the Heartland Institute. (You
can see the footage of the presentation – Examining The Data – here).

Now they’d come to jeer outside a film they’ll never watch made by
people they won’t listen to presenting a message they’re ideologically
incapable of comprehending.

If they ever did see Climate Hustle it would be totally lost on them.

Climate Hustle is the Anti Inconvenient Truth. It’s for people with an
open mind who want to know what’s really going on with the world’s
climate – as opposed to what hucksters like Al Gore want to persuade
them is going on with the world’s climate – all backed up with hard data
and evidence presented by scientists who know and understand, among
them the Nobel-prize-winning Norwegian physicist Ivar Giaever.

Its message ought not to be dynamite, for it is no more than basic science and established fact.

But Climate Hustle is dynamite – at least it will be to most viewers,
especially younger ones – because what it says is so totally at odds
with almost every documentary, TV programme and film that has ever been
made on the subject of global warming. (Apart from Martin Durkin’s The
Great Global Warming Swindle, climate skeptical documentaries are pretty
much non-existent).

Man-made climate change – most especially the notion that global
temperatures can be turned on and off by tiny alterations in the
quantities of the trace gas carbon dioxide – is nothing more than a
green fantasy being used as an excuse for a money making scam by
corporate shysters, a wealth redistribution scheme by the Third World,
and as a power grab by one world government freaks.

One of the key myths it demolishes is the one established by Al Gore in
his pimped-up power point lecture, An Inconvenient Truth, where he
climbs onto a scissor lift to show how dramatically – and apparently
unprecedentedly – CO2 levels have risen in the late Twentieth Century
with inevitably disastrous consequences for the planet.

This scaremongering claim by Gore is a perfect example of what presenter
Marc Morano means by the "Climate Hustle": just like in a card game
where tricksters use sleight-of-hand, distraction techniques, and dirty
tricks in order to con the mark (the mug punter) out of his money, so
the alarmist establishment is withholding key details and presenting
false or distorted information in order to extract vast sums from the
gullible public.

In this case, the details that Gore isn’t giving us are

1. Almost invariably throughout geological history, CO2 increases have
lagged rises in temperature not preceded them. In other words, it’s more
likely that global warming causes increased CO2 rather than that
increased CO2 causes global warming.

2. Current carbon dioxide levels are minuscule compared to what they
were in our deep geological past. As several earth scientists testify in
the movie, our planet is – in terms relative to the past –
"CO2-starved".

Also, in historical terms, we are living through a cold period not a
warm one. This is true of both the long term geological record and also
of more recent history. Until green activists like Michael Mann started
cooking the books with dodgy artefacts like the "Hockey Stick" it was a
widely accepted fact among climate scientists that the earth was warmer
during the Medieval Warming Period (when there were no passenger jets or
4x4s or Chinese building coal-fired power stations every five days)
than it is today.

One of the most powerful sections of the documentary is the one where
various scientists and academics who have dared speak the truth about
global warming describe how they have suddenly found themselves
ostracised by their peers.

Among them is Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and
Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, who
describes CVqdkm2U4AE3QbDhow she lost her faith in the alarmist
establishment at the time of the Climategate emails, when climate
scientists were caught red-handed in emails conspiring to withhold
scientific information from their peers. She was subsequently branded a
heretic.

Another one is Sallie Baliunas, an astrophysicist at the
Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. She was viciously traduced
and ostracised by her peers for questioning so-called "consensus"
climate science. In the film she draws parallels with witchcraft trials
in 13th century France where witchcraft was declared the most urgent
threat to mankind of all and where anyone who dared
CVsVn0JWsAAzuSLdisagree ran the risk of being declared a sorcerer and
rejected – or worse – by mainstream society.

Another is Caleb Rossiter, a left-leaning statistician at American
University, who spoke out against the alarmists when he discovered that
their statistics were junk and that the measures being introduced to
"combat" climate change were harming the world’s poorest. For his
troubles, Rossiter had his fellowship at the US Institute for Policy
Studies terminated.

By the end of this jaunty, likeable, fact-rich journey through the
history of the "global warming" the viewer will be left in no doubt that
climate change is one of the most egregious political and scientific
hoaxes in history.

Morano – even if he does look and dress a bit like a junior Mafiosi – makes a funny, engaging, no-nonsense presenter.

The science is unimpeachable.

I only spotted two mistakes: no Canute did not think he could stop the
waves (quite the opposite actually) and no he is not, as unfortunately
billed in the closing credits, "Prince Charles of Wales."

But I’m being pernickety here. Climate skeptics operate on a fraction of
the budget available to Big Green (which, it has been calculated, has
3,500 times more money than skeptics and is an industry worth in excess
of $1 trillion a year). So if it’s clunky in places, that’s just part of
its rough-hewn charm.

Every person who has ever been exposed to the lies of An Inconvenient
Truth should watch Climate Hustle immediately afterwards an antidote.

Finally a prediction: Climate Hustle is not going to win a prize at
Sundance (where it won’t be screened if greenie Robert Redford has
anything to do with it), nor will it win an Oscar from a Hollywood
swarming with green activists like Leonardo di Caprio and Mark Ruffalo.

But the prizes it is not going to win should be considered a point in
its favour, not as a sign of weakness. As George Orwell said: "In a time
of universal deceit, truth-telling is a revolutionary act."

President Obama said Tuesday that he's confident his successor will
honor any climate change agreement negotiated in Paris becasue "99.5
percent of scientists and 99 percent of world leaders" think that
climate change "is really important."

Obama’s claim that there is a 99.5 percent consensus among scientists on
climate change represents a 2.5 percent increase since May 16, 2013,
when the president tweeted: "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree:
#climate change is real, man-made and dangerous."

"Everybody else is taking climate change really seriously. They think
it's a really big problem. It spans political parties," Obama said
during his press conference in Paris, where the United Nations’ COP 21
climate change summit is being held.

Responding to a question about whether foreign leaders can believe the
U.S. will keep any commitments it makes in Paris if a Republican
succeeds him in the White House, Obama said:

"Whoever is the next president of the United States, if they come in and
they suggest somehow that that global consensus — not just 99.5% of
scientists and experts, but 99% of world leaders — think this is really
important, I think the president of the United States is going to need
to think this is really important."

The origin of the "97 percent" statistic has been traced back to a 2009
study by University of Illinois/Chicago graduate student Kendall
Zimmerman, who sent a survey to 10,257 earth scientists asking them two
questions:

"When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean
global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively
constant?" and

Eighty-two percent of the 3,146 scientists who completed the survey (a
30.7% response rate) answered "yes" to question 2. That figure included
75 of the 79 individuals (97.4%) who self-identified themselves as
climate scientists.

In a 2013 paper published by the Institute of Physic’s IOPScience and
cited by NASA, University of Queensland climate communication fellow
John Cook also stated that 97 percent of scientists who took a position
on global warming agreed that humans were the primary cause.

"Among abstracts expressing a position on AGW [anthropogenic global
warming], 97.1% endorsed the consensus that humans are causing global
warming," Cook and his co-authors stated.

However, a peer review of Cook’s paper by David Legates, a former state
climatologist and professor at the University of Delaware, that was
published in the April 2015 issue of Science and Education debunked the
97 percent consensus figure.

Legates pointed out that only 41 of the 11,944 academic papers Cook
examined in his meta-analysis (0.3%) explicitly stated that most of the
global warming since 1950 was caused by human activity.

"It is astonishing that any journal could have published a paper
claiming a 97% climate consensus when in the authors’ own analysis the
true consensus was well below 1%," Legates wrote.

Cook’s paper was also criticized by other scientists for what they said was a number of methodological errors.

"Probably the most widely repeated claim in the debate over global
warming is that ‘97% of scientists agree’ that climate change is
man-made and dangerous," the three authors of Why Scientists Disagree
About Global Warming wrote in a just-released book published by the
Heartland Institute.

"This claim is not only false, but its presence in the debate is an insult to science."

BREAM: "Well, and you mentioned how much people do or don’t care about
this. In polling, our most recent Fox News polling on the important
issues facing the country, and this is from mid-November, terrorism is
at the top of the list with 24 percent. You have to go a lot further
down to find climate change and it’s 3 percent. Why this continued
campaign by the administration and hundreds of leaders around the world
gathering in Paris?"

KRAUTHAMMER: "Because this president lives in a world of his --
idealistic, if you want to be favorable to it -- and benign about
idealistic and deluded, undergraduate imaginations. This is as if the
League of Nations and the U.N. and everything in between hadn’t
happened. Remember, Obama had a summit in Washington a few years ago to
end nuclear proliferation. He thought it was a great event. I remember
the one announcement of a success was that Canada had given away some
extra surplus stuff, as if the threat of the world is from Canada.

He lives in a world where people get together -- reasonable, educated,
Harvard law school educated people from all over the world, and agree on
futuristic designs that mean nothing, like the League of Nations, like
the U.N., but we have learned something since then, he has learned
nothing. This global warming is the same thing.

Nothing will come of it because it’s not a treaty, it would never get
through the Senate, it’s not going to be binding on anybody. And the
great announcement he made when he was in China, is that we would
radically reduce our emissions by 2025 and China would begin its
reductions in 2030. And he thought that was a triumph. Look, this is
wonderful, he said, What greater rejection of those who would tear down
our world than lead it? How about a serious air campaign over Syria? How
about destroying their oil infrastructure for a start? But that doesn’t
occur to him."

Sir David Attenborough has travelled to places most of us can only dream of.

But his favourite holiday destination of all is one that is reasonably
attainable - although you may have to save for years to follow in his
footsteps - North Queensland in Australia, which is home to the Great
Barrier Reef.

But Sir David has warned that future generations of holidaymakers could
soon be unable to enjoy the same experience because of the damage global
warming is doing to the reef.

Speaking at a screening of his new documentary on the reef at Australia
House in London last week, he said: 'The real danger is the rising
temperatures and acidity and the effect that has - if the acidity grows
to a certain limit it will damage the coral itself.

'The issue at the moment is those changes in the ocean and the speed with which the planet is warming.

'In 20 years, those changes will be imminent and present and unless we
control those changes, there will be severe bleaching of the coral.

'The great thing is that it does recover if the conditions improve.

Sir David lays the blame solely at the door of the increasing human population and says that there are now too many of us.

He said: 'The greatest concern at the moment is the warming of the
planet and the speed with which the human species are spreading.

'There were 2.5 billion people on the planet when I first went to the
Great Barrier Reef and there are now three times that. We're overrunning
the Planet.'

But rising temperatures are having a destructive effect on the ecosystem [Since they are not rising, that must be difficult]

In fact, he claims to have seen no damage with his own eyes from
visitors to the reef and says that the people he encountered there were
very respectful of the famous ecosystem.

He said: 'That the change is only something that an expert can see, to my eye it was a ravishing appearance.

'The obvious [change from] when we sailed there 60 years ago is then we
hardly saw anyone at all - it's not like that now, the population has
increased.'

'[But] people are usually very well behaved because they are so stunned by what they see, so they see it with great respect.'

Sir David was talking about the reef ahead of the launch of his new
three-part documentary on the world's largest living organism

Last year, he spent three weeks exploring the reef as part of the TV
series for the BBC called The Great Barrier Reef with David
Attenborough, which will air on BBC1 later this month.

The show will look at the animals that live on the reef as well as the
effects of global warming and the people who are working to protect the
reef and its inhabitants from this danger.

California’s roads are an obstacle course of potholes and as Foon Rhee
of the Sacramento Bee notes "the repair backlog is estimated at $78
billion for local roads and another $59 billion for state highways." The
rough roads are also highly congested but the massive California
Department of Transportation (Caltrans) is not eager to build new roads
and claims to have "solid science" on their side in the form of
Increasing Highway Capacity Unlikely to Relieve Traffic Congestion, a
National Center for Sustainable Transportation Brief.

According to author Susan Handy of the Department of Environmental
Science and Policy at UC Davis, "adding capacity to roadways fails to
alleviate congestion for long because it actually increases vehicle
miles traveled (VMT)." Handy, who is in fact the director of the federal
National Center for Sustainable Transportation, further explains,
"capacity expansion does not increase employment or other economic
activity." So building new roads and highways is a lose-lose proposition
for the workers, and refusing to build new roads is a winner for
ruling-class bureaucrats and politicians.

As Foon Rhee observes, endorsement of the induced travel theory "does
keep Caltrans in tune with Gov. Jerry Brown’s crusade to put California
at the forefront of adapting to climate change." So climate change dogma
gets right down to where the rubber meets the road, as the tire
commercial used to say. "By being part of the climate change team with
the governor," Rhee writes, "Caltrans could eventually have fewer
projects to oversee and less work to do. A government agency not
expanding its empire – now that would be a new one." That would indeed
be a new one, but it won’t happen with Caltrans.

As we noted, Caltrans maintains 3,500 full-time engineers who do little
more than show up at their desks, and the state recently gave them a
raise. So Caltrans will hardly hesitate to maintain full-time employees
who don’t build new roads. California taxpayers might also note that
neither induced travel theory or climate change dogma stopped Caltrans
from building the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which came in 10
years late, $5 billion over budget, and which remains unsafe. No
Caltrans boss lost his job, and nobody has been held accountable.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

9 December, 2015

‘Complete Transformation’ of US Energy System Will Stop four hundredths of one Degree of Global Warming, Congress Told

The projected increase in global temperature averted by President
Obama’s pledge to reduce U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 28 percent
over the next decade comes out to an "environmentally inconsequential"
0.04 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, the assistant director
of the Cato Institute’s Center for the Study of Science testified before
the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology last month.

"I basically told the committee that U.S. actions aimed at mitigating
future climate change by limiting CO2 emissions from U.S. power plants
and the rest of the economy would have a very small impact on future
climate change," Paul "Chip" Knappenberger told CNSNews.com.

"So small, in fact, that it probably wouldn’t be scientifically detectable."

Knappenberger said a widely available climate modeling tool developed
under funding from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) shows that
compared to worldwide CO2 emissions, any cutbacks by the U.S. would
amount to "a proverbial drop in the bucket, they’re so small," he said.

Knappenberger warned Congress that President Obama’s stated goal to
decrease CO2 emissions 80 percent by 2050 will require a "complete
transformation of the energy system beyond what we can even imagine."

"Basically there’s no way to get there right now with current technology."

But even if CO2 emissions were scaled back to Civil War-era levels, it
would only avert four one-hundredths of a degree of global warming by
the end of the century, he told CNSNews.com.

Although some people are going to gauge the success of the United
Nations’ COP21 climate change conference in Paris "on whether they come
back with something that’s legally binding," Knappenberger said he would
be "surprised" if they did.

"The pledges just weren’t designed that way," he told CNSNews.com. They
are "very loosey-goosey, along the lines of ‘We’re going to try to
reduce our emission intensity by 40 percent by some year in the
future’."

However, even if all the carbon-reduction pledges were honored, their
total impact comes "very, very close to the same temperature you get if
you just presume business as usual going forward with no directed
actions at mitigating climate change," he said.

"So basically whatever comes out of Paris will have no impact on the future course of climate."

The burden of proof for Anthropogenic Climate Change falls on alarmists.
Climate Change (CC) has been ongoing for millions of years—long before
humans existed on this planet.

Obviously, the causes were all of natural origin, and not anthropogenic.

There is no reason to believe that these natural causes have suddenly
stopped; for example, volcanic eruptions, various types of solar
influences, and (internal) atmosphere-ocean oscillations all continue
today. (Note that these natural factors cannot be modeled precisely.)

Let’s call this the "Null Hypothesis." Logically therefore, the burden
of proof is on alarmists to demonstrate that the Null Hypothesis is not
adequate to account for empirical climate data; alarmists must provide
convincing observational evidence for Anthropogenic CC (ACC)—by detailed
comparison of empirical data with GH models.

I am not aware of such proofs, only of anecdotal info—although I admit
that ACC is plausible; after all, CO2 is a GH gas, and its level has
been rising, mainly because of burning of fossil fuels.

However, ACC appears to be much smaller than predicted by GH models;
there is even believed to be a period of no warming ["hiatus"] during
the past 19 years—in spite of rapidly rising atmospheric CO2 levels [1].

There seems to be no generally accepted explanation for this
discrepancy. Yet as the gap grows, the five IPCC reports insist there is
no gap—with ever greater claimed certainty; rising from 50% to 99%.

In other words, GH models have not been, and may never be validated;
hence are not policy-relevant. They are scenario-generation machines
that rest on assumptions and incomplete science—not on actual
observations [2].

Anyway, warming appears to be trivially small, and most likely
economically beneficial overall—as established through careful studies
by leading economists.

I therefore regard the absence of any significant GH warming as settled,
and policies to limit CO2 emissions as wasting resources needed for
genuine societal problems—and even as counter-productive, since CO2
promotes plant growth and raises crop yields [3]

Surviving a coming climate cooling

I am much more concerned about a cooling climate, as predicted by many
solar scientists [4], with its adverse ecological effects and severe
economic consequences for humanity.

Singer and Avery [5] have described the cyclical CC, seen during the
past major glaciation; Loehle and Singer [6] see evidence for extension
of the cycles into the current Holocene.

In particular, historical records [7] identify the recent cycle of a
(beneficial) Medieval Warm Period and the (destructive) Little Ice Age
(LIA) with its failed harvests, starvation, disease, and mass deaths.

I have therefore explored ways [8] to counter the (imminently expected)
next cooling phase through low-cost and low-ecological-risk methods of a
specific GH effect—not based on CO2.

At the same time, assuming that our scheme does not work, we need to
prepare for adaptation [9] to a colder climate—with special attention to
supply of food, and of sustainable water and energy.

The outlook appears promising—provided there is adequate preparation.
However, the coming cold period will test the survivability of our
technological civilization.

The climate summit underway in Paris will almost certainly not be an
occasion to take stock of what’s been wrong with policymakers’ approach
to rising temperatures in the past few decades. What a pity. If this
were all it did, its contribution would be far more useful than the
unrealistic goals, ideological sophistry, and political posturing likely
to fuel the final conference report.

What should the fiasco of the Kyoto Protocol have taught our leaders? If
anything, it should have taught them that, in public policy, the means
by which one tries to achieve a goal are at least as important as the
goal itself, and that pursuing an objective with ideological obsession,
without understanding the consequences of the means employed, can cause
much harm.

Signed in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol aimed to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels within a decade and a half.
To achieve this, it placed binding caps on emissions in industrialized
countries. The deadline passed, and Kyoto is now synonymous with utter
failure. What conclusion did the major players extract? Basically, the
idea that its fatal flaw was the international imposition of caps,
something that could be easily remedied by having each country impose a
reduction in emissions on itself. Thus, the United States decided to cut
emissions about 27 percent below 2005 levels by 2025, and the European
Union set for itself the aim of cutting them 40 percent below 1990
levels by 2030. And so on.

They should have been paying attention to the real problem. One
statistic says it all: coal, the dirtiest of the dirty energy sources,
is now responsible for 40 percent of the world’s electricity and about
30 percent of its energy overall, the highest level in decades—a
testament to the failure of the politically favored alternatives.

By setting arbitrary goals for themselves, the leading countries went on
to pick whatever means were deemed necessary. A major effort was made,
for instance, to spread the use of wind turbines and solar panels. This
effort proved extremely expensive and achieved almost nothing. Less than
half of one percent of our energy comes from solar and wind sources
today. According to the International Energy Agency, another $2.5
trillion in subsidies will be needed over the next 25 years to keep up
with political promises. What would that achieve? By 2100 the
temperature rise would be a mere 0.03 degrees Fahrenheit less than
without the subsidies.

Not to mention other sources dear to politicians, especially biofuels
(which comprise about three-quarters of renewable sources today).
Pursuing them has worsened the pressure on scarce water resources,
caused more pollution through the expanded use of fertilizers, led to
greater deforestation in several counties and, of course, made food a
lot more expensive. Several times in the past few years these
consequences even triggered violent riots in Asia.

The realization that the emission goals were unrealistic, and that the
means adopted to achieve them were useless or even counterproductive,
has led long-time supporters of these policies to admit that, in the
words of The Economist, "global warming cannot be dealt with using
today’s tools and mindsets."

We need to conduct a lot more research, use market mechanisms to bring
about innovative technology, have a much clearer understanding of the
economic trade-offs related to the various options available and, above
all, approach the subject with humility. Bombastic goals and pernicious
means have not led us anywhere since Kyoto. Paris looks likely to
prolong the tradition.

There has been a lot of attention given to China at the climate
conference in Paris. As the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions
in the world, a lot depends on what China will do—or more accurately
what it won’t do. Lots of media reports have commended China for its
sudden commitment to climate change. But how the media is portraying
China’s commitment to combat global warming isn’t based on reality.

China’s Air Pollution Is Not Carbon Dioxide

Many stories about China and climate change mention China as the top
polluter, complete with nasty pictures of factories spewing out black
smoke, while also discussing the need to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions.

It’s true that China has serious air and water quality problems. But do
not associate those problems with carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is a
colorless, odorless, non-toxic gas. The U.N.’s push to reduce carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions is predicated solely on
carbon dioxide’s alleged impact on the climate, which appears to be much
smaller than the climate models are projecting.

Unlike China, America’s power plants are largely clean of the pollutants that we know have adverse health effects.

We should also be wary of any commitment from China because they’ve been
grossly underreporting their carbon dioxide emissions and use of coal.

According to a recent story from the New York Times:

China, the world’s leading emitter of greenhouse gases from coal, has
been burning up to 17 percent more coal a year than the government
previously disclosed, according to newly released data. The finding
could complicate the already difficult efforts to limit global warming.
Even for a country of China’s size, the scale of the correction is
immense. The sharp upward revision in official figures means that China
has released much more carbon dioxide—almost a billion more tons a year
according to initial calculations—than previously estimated.

China is building more than 350 coal-fired power plants and has plans to
build another 800. This is the country we’re going to trust to peak
emissions 15 years from now?

The rest of the world should encourage China to address the issue of
smog and water contamination. These environmental problems have real
adverse human health and environmental impacts. Instead, international
bodies are pressing for China to divert resources to address global
warming—resources that country could use to truly clean up its
environment.

The Problem With International Climate Negotiations

Generally speaking, there are two fundamental issues that have broken
down international climate negotiations every year. The developing
world’s refusal to curb economic growth to reduce carbon dioxide
emissions and the amount of money developing countries want compared to
what the developed world is willing to shell out.

Proponents of a negotiation argue that this time is different and that
China is making moves to reduce its carbon footprint. China has entered
into a climate pact with the U.S. to peak greenhouse gas emissions in
2030 and has set up a pilot cap-and-trade program, and its government
continues to pour billions into renewable energy.

If China is not addressing its harmful smog and poor water quality
issues, we should be skeptical of its commitment to address global
warming. (Again, nor should we be encouraging CO2 reduction. Instead, we
should focus on real environmental problems.)

We should also be skeptical of the notion that China will stay true to
its word 15 years into the future. Effectively, the agreement the Obama
administration made with China is that American households and
businesses will suffer from higher energy costs now because of carbon
regulations in exchange for China maybe doing something in 2030.
Importantly, there has been no discussion of India. If China actually
did follow through with its commitment to peak carbon emissions in 2030,
India likely will have overtaken China as the most populous country.

China’s Increased Greenhouse Gas Emissions Are a Good Thing

The developing world’s use of coal, oil, and natural gas should be
celebrated, not condemned. Affordable and reliable energy is an
essential input for a better standard of living and economic growth.
China’s gross domestic product per capita has increased from a little
more than $300 in 1990 to nearly $7,000 today. The increase is
impressive, but it’s nowhere near the levels of the GDP per capita of
the developed world. The U.S. GDP per capita is more than $53,000.

The focus for China, India, and the rest of the developing world should
be promoting economic development and introducing economic freedom.
Economically freer countries also enjoy cleaner environments.

Freer economies have access to more products and technologies that make
our lives healthier and the environment cleaner. For instance, the
availability of simple products like soaps, cleaners, and detergents
makes our homes dramatically cleaner and healthier. Freer economies with
a sound rule of law protect private property rights. And as a country
grows economically, it increases the financial ability of its citizens
and businesses to care for the environment and reduce pollutants emitted
from industrial growth.

You don’t have to scratch the surface too deeply to understand that
China’s about-face on climate change is nothing more than a charade.

Imagine a country paying other countries to regulate itself out of
productivity and prosperity. Then imagine that the same regulations
would bind the first country more so than the others. Then again,
imagine that the first country in question was doing all of this for a
reason that cannot effectively be quantified or scientifically
replicated, but persists anyway in the midst of stagnating growth and
crushing debt.

So much for imagination.

The Obama administration is rushing onward in Paris with the hopes of
funding an ongoing global scheme to pay poorer countries to atone for
our supposed contributions to climate change. The administration is
pledging to siphon $3 billion annually into what will eventually become a
$100 billion a year fund, with the U.S. contribution rising to more $25
billion annually. This money is leveraging cooperation from reticent
countries who themselves are looking to grow their economies, as well as
their carbon output.

In true United Nations (U.N.) fashion, American taxpayers present and
future, will be paying the countries that ultimately compete with us on
the world stage. Their incentive is to take the money, and return to
future climate conferences where they will have a say in further
limiting American carbon emissions and production, and with it our
economic productivity. What can be done about it?

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) was the first to say no. Sen. Inhofe, along
with 36 other Senate colleagues, said in a letter that no funds would be
disbursed to the U.N. fund until the President introduced his climate
agreement to the Senate as a treaty. The President likely plans to
bypass the Senate’s constricting purse strings as well as the treaty
clause and unilaterally obligate the United States to the terms of the
Paris agreement.

In a statement on Thursday, Americans for Limited Government President
Rick Manning weighed in, saying, "Congress should just say no to Obama’s
$3 billion promise to the U.N. Green Climate Fund by explicitly
stipulating in the omnibus that no funds shall be spent on it. The
reality is that the U.S. commitment to the Green Climate Fund is
anticipated to dramatically expand in the years to come to more than $25
billion annually as part of a $100 billion a year global wealth
transfer to developing economies."

"We already subsidize developing economies with world trade rules that
grant special and differential treatment, and the new Paris climate deal
will exempt developing economies from the punitive regulations that the
U.S. adheres to. Not to be outdone, then those same countries will
receive $100 billion a year that U.S. taxpayers will disproportionately
fund," Manning added.

Most of the Republicans in the Senate have already taken a stand to
withhold funds from the President’s U.N. climate fund scheme. Their
leadership should be matched in the House of Representatives with a
formal defund in the coming omnibus that overtly bans further monies
from being spent to undermine the American economy with this climate
fund. The majorities in both chambers were empowered to stop job killing
policies such as this one, and funding the President’s reckless,
unilateral climate policies endanger both their majorities and their
constituents.

The seven most insidious fossil fuel lobbyists in Paris to weaken
attempts to agree a global climate deal have been named and shamed as
‘climate criminals’ in a dossier published by the global citizens
movement Avaaz.

The group, which spearheaded last weekend’s climate marches which saw
785,000 people take to the streets globally, posted over a thousand
‘Wanted’ posters outside 5-star hotels in the French capital on Monday
morning. The poster highlighting the seven most notorious dirty energy
lobbyists unearthed from the list of more than 50,000 delegates at
summit.

On Monday morning, Avaaz ‘Climate Cops’ will hand out flyers
outside key Metro stations leading to the Le Bourget with photos of the
lobbyists, who are expected to ramp up their efforts to derail a deal
when ministers arrive this week to negotiate the deal.

Emma Ruby-Sachs, Acting Executive-Director of Avaaz says: "These
lobbyists have come to Paris to sabotage a global deal for ambitious
climate action, despite over 3.6 million citizens around the world
calling for 100% clean energy. Ministers must listen to their people,
not polluters, and refuse meetings with climate criminals who want to
derail a deal the whole world wants."

Each of the seven named lobbyists is renowned for their backroom
dealings to to stop the transition to clean energy and push the
interests of dirty fossil fuels. Some have resorted to harassing climate
scientists and even calling for them to be ‘publicly flogged’.

The lobbyists include:

* Benjamin Sporton, head of the World Coal Association

* Fiona Wild, representative of mining-giant BHP Billiton

* Marc Morano, whose trademark activity is to publish the email
addresses of climate scientists to expose them to hate mail.

Examples of lobbyists’ far-reaching influence within climate meetings
include The World Coal Association setting up shop next to the COP19
summit in Warsaw in 2013 to convince negotiators to embrace coal as a
solution to climate change.

This resulted in the Warsaw Communiqué promoting clean coal, which has
been deemed as "a myth" by National Geographic. At the COP17 in Durban
in 2011, the Carbon Capture and Storage Association (comprised of major
fossil fuel and power companies) successfully lobbied for carbon credits
for new coal plants.

With global warming a clear scientific reality, the world has become
increasingly intolerant of the fossil fuel industry’s attempts to
undermine climate science and climate legislation. The campaign comes
off the back of recent cases cracking down on "climate criminals,"
including the investigation into Exxon for allegedly lying to the public
about the risk of climate change.

The dossier is published as part of Avaaz’s 100% Clean campaign, which has been backed by more than 3.6 million people.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

8 December, 2015

Skeptic-abuser Lewandowski is just one symptom of a wider malaise among psychologists

At the back of a small room at Coogee Beach, Sydney, I sat watching as a
psychologist I had never heard of paced the room gesticulating. His
voice was loud. Over six feet tall, his presence was imposing. It was
Lee Jussim. He had come to the Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology to
talk about left-wing bias in social psychology.

Left-wing bias, he said, was undermining his field. Graduate students
were entering the field in order to change the world rather than
discover truths. Because of this, he said, the field was riddled with
flaky research and questionable theories.

Jussim’s talk began with one of the most egregious examples of bias in
recent years. He drew the audience’s attention to the paper: "NASA faked
the moon landing – therefore (climate) science is a hoax." The study
was lead by Stephan Lewandowsky, and published in Psychological Science
in 2013. The paper argued that those who believed that the moon landing
was a hoax also believed that climate science was a fraud. The abstract
stated:

We…show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that
the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing)
predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other
scientific findings above and beyond commitment to laissez-faire free
markets. This provides confirmation of previous suggestions that
conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.

After describing the study and reading the abstract, Jussim paused. Something big was coming.

"But out of 1145 participants, only ten agreed that the moon landing was
a hoax!" he said. "Of the study’s participants, 97.8% who thought that
climate science was a hoax, did not think that the moon landing also a
hoax."

His fellow psychologists shifted in their seats. Jussim pointed out that
the level of obfuscation the authors went to, in order to disguise
their actual data, was intense. Statistical techniques appeared to have
been chosen that would hide the study’s true results. And it appeared
that no peer reviewers, or journal editors, took the time, or went to
the effort of scrutinizing the study in a way that was sufficient to
identify the bold misrepresentations.

While the authors’ political motivations for publishing the paper were
obvious, it was the lax attitude on behalf of peer reviewers – Jussim
suggested – that was at the heart of the problems within social
psychology. The field had become a community in which political values
and moral aims were shared, leading to an asymmetry in which studies
that reinforced left-wing narratives had come to be disproportionately
represented in the literature. And this was not, to quote Stephen
Colbert, because "reality had a liberal bias". It was because social
psychology had a liberal bias.

Jussim explained that within the field, those on the left outnumbered
those on the right by a ratio of about 10:1. So it meant that even if
left-leaning and right-leaning scientists were equal in their bias,
there would be at least ten times more research biased towards
validating left-wing narratives than conservative narratives. Adding in
the apparent double standards in the peer review process (where studies
validating left-wing narratives seemed to be easier to publish) then the
bias within the field could vastly exceed the ratio of 10:1. In other
words, research was becoming an exercise in groupthink.

***

Jussim appears to have had an anti-authoritarian streak since day one.
Born in Brooklyn 1955, his family moved to Long Island when he was
twelve. He lost his mother the following year from illness, and after
that, he lost his father as well, although this time not from illness,
but from grief. It was at this tender age that Jussim entered into a
life of self-reliance. Ferociously independent, Jussim describes having
little respect for, or deference to, authority figures. In high school
he says he purposely made life miserable for his teachers, and later he
would become an anti-war activist.

In 1975, at the age of 20, he was a university dropout. He did not
return again to study until four years later, when he began
undergraduate psychology, and it was not until 1986, at the age of 30,
that Jussim achieved his first publication. By this stage he was already
married with a baby.

Jussim may not have known at this point that he was destined to continue
living a life of non-conformity. He was a reformed delinquent and
anti-Vietnam war activist. He had his PhD and a publication under his
belt. He had settled down. His former life of rabble rousing and trouble
making was over.

Or so he thought.

Very early in his career, Jussim faced a crisis of sorts. An early
mentor, Jacquelynne Eccles, handed him some large datasets gathered from
school children and teachers in educational settings. He tried testing
the social psychology theories he had studied, but consistently found
that his data contradicted them.

Instead of finding that the teachers’ expectations influenced the
students’ performances, he found that the students’ performances
influenced the teachers’ expectations. This data "misbehaved". It did
not show that stereotypes created, or even had much influence on the
real world. The data did not show that teachers’ expectations strongly
limited students’ performances. It did not show that stereotypes became
self-fulfilling prophecies. But instead of filing his results away into a
desk drawer, Jussim kept investigating – for three more decades.

The Crisis in Social Psychology

Some months after Jussim’s presentation at the 2015 Sydney Symposium,
the results of the Reproducibility Project in psychology were announced.
This project found that out of 100 psychological studies, only about
30%-50% could be replicated.

The reproducibility project follows in the wake of a crisis that has
engulfed social psychology in recent years. A slew of classic studies
have never been able to be fully replicated. (Replication is a benchmark
of the scientific method. If a study cannot be replicated, it suggests
that the results were a fluke, and not an accurate representation of the
real world).

For example, Bargh, Chen and Burrows published one of the most famous
experiments of the field in 19963. In it, students were divided into two
groups: one group received priming with the stereotype of elderly
people; the other students received no priming (the control group). When
the students left the experiment, those who had been primed with the
stereotype of the elderly, walked down a corridor significantly more
slowly than the students assigned to the control. While it has never
been completely replicated, it has been cited over 3400 times. It also
features in most social psychology textbooks.

Another classic study by Darley & Gross published in 1983, found
that people applied a stereotype about social class when they saw a
young girl taking a math test, but did not when they saw a young girl
not taking a math test5. Two attempts at exact replication have failed6.
And both replication attempts actually found the opposite pattern –
that people apply stereotypes when they have no other information about a
person, but switch them off when they do6.

In the field of psychology, what counts as a "replication" is
controversial. Researchers have not yet reached a consensus on whether a
replication means that an effect of the same size was found. Or that an
effect size was found within the same confidence intervals. Or whether
it is an effect in the same direction. How one defines replication will
likely impact whether one sees a "replication" as being successful or
not. So while some of social psychology’s classic studies have not been
fully replicated, there have been partial replications, and a debate
still rages around what exactly constitutes one. But here’s the kicker:
even in the partial replications of some of these stereotype studies,
the research has been found to be riddled with p-hacking4. (P-hacking
refers to the exploitation of researcher degrees of freedom until a
desirable result is found).

***

When I went through University as a psychology undergraduate Jussim’s
work was not on the curriculum. His studies were not to be found in my
social psychology textbook. Nor was Jussim ever mentioned in the
classroom. Yet the area of study Jussim has been a pioneer of –
stereotype accuracy – is one of the most robust and replicable areas
ever to emerge from the discipline.

To talk about stereotypes, one has to first define what they are.
Stereotypes are simply beliefs about a group of people. They can be
positive (children are playful) or they can be negative (bankers are
selfish), or they can be somewhere in between (librarians are quiet).
When stereotypes are defined as beliefs about groups of people (true or
untrue), they correlate with real world criteria with effect sizes
ranging from .4 to .9, with the average coming in somewhere around .8.
(This is close to the highest effect size that a social science
researcher can find, an effect size of 1.0 would mean that stereotypes
correspond 100% to real world criteria. Many social psychological
theories rest on studies which have effect sizes of around .2.)

Jussim and his co-authors have found that stereotypes accurately predict
demographic criteria, academic achievement, personality and behaviour7.
This picture becomes more complex, however, when considering
nationality or political affiliation. One area of stereotyping which is
consistently found to be inaccurate are the stereotypes concerning
political affiliation; right-wingers and left wingers tend to caricature
each others personalities, most often negatively so7.

Lest one thinks that these results paint a bleak picture of human
nature, Jussim and his colleagues have also found that people tend to
switch off some of their stereotypes – especially the descriptive ones –
when they interact with individuals7. It appears that descriptive
stereotypes are a crutch to lean on when we have no other information
about a person. When we gain additional insights into people, these
stereotypes are no longer useful. And there is now a body of evidence to
suggest that stereotypes are not as fixed, unchangeable and inflexible
as they’ve historically been portrayed to be8.

A Cool Reception

Studying the accuracy of stereotypes is risky business. For many,
investigation into stereotypes is tantamount to endorsing bigotry. To
understand why this is the case, one has to take a long view of the
discipline’s history.

Social psychology arose from the ashes of World War 2. An entire
generation had to come to terms with the legacy of the war, and the
study of prejudice and authoritarianism naturally captured their
imaginations. Gordon Allport, a mentor of Stanley Milgram,
conceptualised stereotypes in his 1954 book The Nature of Prejudice as
inaccurate, pernicious and unshakeable, and influential in shaping the
social world9. From this point onwards, this conception has largely
remained unchallenged.

Reactions to Jussim’s findings about the accuracy of stereotypes have
varied on the scale between lukewarm and ice cold. At Stanford this year
after giving a talk, an audience member articulated a position
reflected by many within his field:

"Social psychologists should be not be studying whether people are
accurate in perceiving groups! They should be studying how situations
create disadvantage."

Jussim has heard this position over and over again. Not just from
students, but also colleagues. One might find it surprising that
psychology researchers would become so invested in shutting down
research they find politically unbearable. But one shouldn’t be.

It is not uncommon for social psychologists to list "the promotion of
social justice" as a research topic on their CVs, or on their university
homepages. One academic, John Jost at New York University, who argues
that conservatism is a form of motivated cognition, runs what he calls
the Social Justice Lab. Within the scientific community, the blending of
science with political activism is far from being frowned upon. One
only has to take a brief look at Twitter to see that scientists are
often in practice of tweeting about "white privilege", "women in STEM",
"structural disadvantage", "affirmative action", and "stereotypes". For
many scientists, the crusade to change the world is seen as part of
one’s job description.

Jussim has weathered aloof, and at times openly hostile attitudes to his
work for virtually three decades. In an email to me earlier in the
year, he wrote that he felt like his work life has been lived in
solitary confinement. It is possible that Jussim’s citation count – or
impact factor – has been artificially suppressed. And for renegade
academics such as Jussim to get published, they often must resort to
sugar-coating and camouflaging their results, leaving important findings
out of journal titles and abstracts.

Yet he points out that despite the hostility towards stereotype
accuracy, he has been well treated by social psychology – having being
given an American Psychological Association Early Career Award in 1997 –
and being cited by his peers over 6000 times. Jussim also points out
that while doing research that breaks taboos and undermines political
narratives is hard, it is not impossible. Ultimately the scientific
method wins.

It is too early to know how research into stereotypes will unfold in the
future. And we do not know yet if social psychology will ever be able
to achieve ideological diversity, or realistically address its left-wing
bias. What is certain, however, is that despite producing work that has
been unwelcome and unpopular, Lee Jussim has remained a faithful
servant to the scientific method. Even in the face of great personal
costs.

I could see that the Lewandowski article stank from day 1. And I said so at the time. An incidental point of interest: I put up conclusions about stereotyping long ago that are essentially the same as Jussim's points -- JR

Have greenhouse gases peaked? As politicians battle to reach a deal at Paris climate talks, CO2 levels could be falling

Once again, natural climate events are overtaking and surprising the Warmists

Dangerous levels of carbon dioxide blamed for climate change could have peaked after decades of almost non-stop rises.

As ministers from around the world arrive in Paris for the final week of
UN climate talks, figures published this week will reportedly show that
greenhouse gas emissions have stabilised and could be on course to
start falling.

It suggests world leaders could yet meet targets to almost halve CO2
emissions by 2050 to limit rising temperatures while still meeting
energy demands.

Negotiators from 195 countries at the Paris talks have produced a draft
of the climate deal, which aims to curb temperature rises and avoid
dangerous climate change.

Much still needs to be agreed by ministers in the high-level talks that begin on Monday.

But expectations are running higher that they are closer to securing a
global climate deal than at a United Nations summit in Copenhagen six
years ago.

Key to limiting global warming to below 2C by 2100 is a major reduction in carbon emissions.

In the last decade, CO2 levels have more than trebled since the early 1960s and are up by almost a third in the last decade.

However figures due to be published tomorrow will say emissions 'nearly
stalled' at 37bn tonnes of CO2 last year, according to The Sunday Times.

It suggests that emissions could be level or even fall in 2015, raising
early hopes of turning point in the battle to limit the environmental
impact of human behaviour.

It would raise expectations of meeting ambitious targets to reduce
greenhouse gases dramatically, from a total of around 37billion to just
15billion by 2050.

Justine Greening, Britain's International Development Secretary, warned
climate change will make the world more unstable, with consequences that
end up on the UK's doorstep.

Speaking at the climate talks in Paris, she said rising temperatures put
stability, prosperity and security at risk. 'We see the issues of
conflict and instability literally ending up on our doorstep; you only
have to look at the migration crisis over the summer from Syria to see
today things that happen around the world impact Britain.

'It also matters from a prosperity perspective, when we're helping
countries develop ... that's in our interest. 'How does climate
change fit into that? It puts both at risk,' she told the Press
Association. 'It makes our world more unstable, unless we can
tackle it, and it hinders prosperity at the same time.'

She announced a new initiative to give millions more people insurance against climate-related disasters in developing countries.

And she said felt there was a 'real will to reach a positive, sensible
and ambitious outcome', though she acknowledged the remaining
negotiations would be tough.

Key issues that are yet to be agreed include a long-term goal for
reducing the emissions that cause dangerous climate change by the second
half of the century and the provision of finance for poor countries to
cope with global warming.

Countries are also being urged to revisit pledges already made to cut
their greenhouse gases up to 2030, and potentially improve on them.

Tasneem Essop, head of WWF's delegation to the UN climate talks in
Paris, said it would be 'quite a sprint' for ministers to secure a
strong deal by Friday, when the talks are scheduled to end, and it was
up to the French, who as hosts preside over the meeting, to take the
talks to the finish line.

'The draft negotiating text, while more clear in terms of options, still
reflects most of the divergences amongst countries. This will require
immense skill on the part of the French presidency and absolute
co-operation between governments to mediate these differences.

'We're hoping that in the rush to the end, ministers do not trade ambition for expediency, and remain true to the science.'

You can guess what would happen if you used the same tactics that climate alarmists employ

Paul Driessen

Suppose you’ve been using some creative data, accounting and legal
interpretations for years to reduce your tax bill – and the IRS suddenly
flags you for a full-blown audit. Instead of trembling in your boots,
shredding your records, calling a top-flight lawyer, and preparing for
an extended jail visit, just do this:

Patiently explain that your raw data, records and other documents are
your private property. Your legal analyses, accounting methods, and
unique computer codes and algorithms are proprietary. The IRS has no
right to see them. When the agents ask you questions, explain that you
don’t recall any details. If they get testy or threaten you with arrest,
just say you resent their intimidation tactics.

Absurd? A ticket to the slammer? Maybe not. Similar ploys worked for Lois Lerner and Hillary Clinton.

More to the point, they’ve worked like a charm for scientists who’ve
received millions of tax dollars to crank out studies insisting that we
face increasingly serious, previously unimaginable climate and weather
cataclysms, because we use fossil fuels to power our economy, create
jobs and improve living standards.

These studies do not merely sit on shelves. Politicians, bureaucrats,
journalists, activists and scientists cite them to justify policies that
require us to dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions – and thus
our energy use, employment rates and living standards. If the studies
are biased, based on "homogenized," exaggerated, manipulated or
fabricated data, or result from garbage-in/garbage-out computer models –
we need to know that, before expensive, destructive regulations are
imposed on us. Or so we would think.

World leaders are meeting right now in Paris, often using absurd claims,
and alarming reports, to forge a global treaty saying the world must
eliminate 96% of the greenhouse gases that all humanity would likely
release if we reach world population levels, economic growth and living
standards predicted for 2050 – by steadily eliminating increasingly more
energy efficient, low-carbon fuels and technologies.

Such reductions would mean slashing energy use and average world per
capita GDP from its projected $30,600 in 2050 to a miserly $1,200 per
year, says energy analyst Roger Bezdek. Average per capita GDP in 2050
would be less than what Americans "enjoyed" in 1830! Many futuristic
technologies would still exist, but only wealthy families and ruling
elites would be able to afford them.

Congress is therefore absolutely right to demand access to the raw data,
accounting and data revision methodologies, computer codes and
algorithms, emails and analytical methods that taxpayer-financed
scientists and agencies used in developing and justifying EPA’s Clean
Power Plan, NOAA’s declarations that various months were the "hottest on
record," claims that myriad disasters will occur if we don’t curb
carbon dioxide emissions, and assertions that only a global treaty will
save planet and humanity.

That’s why House Science Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) has asked
NOAA director Kathryn Sullivan to turn over documents related to a
study that claimed global warming has not stalled for almost 19 years,
as satellite records show. The NOAA study adjusted sea-surface
temperature data from a global network of buoys upward by 0.12 degrees
Celsius (0.25 F), to "homogenize" the buoy data with records from engine
intake systems on ships – and thereby create a previously undetected
warming trend.

But the intake data were contaminated by heat from the ships, whereas
the buoy network was designed for accurate environmental monitoring. A
more honest, defensible study would have adjusted the ship data
downward, to "homogenize" them with more reliable buoy data. But the
feds needed a warming trend.

Smith has threatened to use "civil and/or criminal enforcement
mechanisms" if the agency doesn’t provide the documents. The American
Meteorological Society says these are "intimidation" tactics that
unfairly question the integrity of NOAA scientists. However, Smith is
right to defend to public interest in knowing that such studies are
honest and credible.

After all, we taxpayers paid for them, and they are being used to
promote policies that will affect our livelihoods, liberties, living
standards and even life spans. If the scientists have nothing to hide,
they should be happy to engage in a robust peer review – in essence, to
defend their novel PhD thesis.

Instead, requests to see data or engage in discussion or debate are met
with outright refusals. EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy has said she
would "protect" her agency’s data, analyses and reports from people and
organizations that she alone decides "are not qualified to analyze" the
materials. The agency has implemented numerous costly regulations with
no attempt to verify IPCC "science" or even consider the rules’ impacts
on the health and welfare of families whose breadwinners will lose their
jobs.

Other tax-funded groups have likewise refused to discuss their findings
with climate disaster skeptics. Some have even asked the Justice
Department to initiate RICO racketeering prosecutions of organizations
that raise inconvenient questions about climate studies. The White House
has enlisted virtually every US Government agency, including the
Defense Department, in its determined effort to employ global warming
claims to "fundamentally transform" the United States before President
Obama leaves office.

We should not be surprised. Billions of dollars in annual US government
grants and a $1.5-trillion-per-year climate crisis and renewable energy
industry mean people will jealously guard their money trains.

EPA has paid members of its Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee
$180.8 million since 2000. Grants from EPA and other federal agencies to
the American Lung Association over the same period total $43 million,
for rubberstamping and promoting government decisions on pollution and
climate change.

Courts have let former U of Virginia researcher Michael Mann refuse to
provide tax-funded data and emails, even to the former Virginia Attorney
General, on the ground that they are proprietary. DMD (Data
Manipulation Disease) is not confined to the USA or Britain’s Climate
Research Unit. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has also "homogenized"
temperature records so thoroughly that it was able to convert a cooling
trend of 1 Celsius degree per century (1.8 F) into a 2.5 degree C (4.5
F) warming trend!

And now developing countries want $1 trillion from developed nations
between 2020 and 2030, for climate "reparations and adaptation."
Otherwise the poor countries won’t sign any document drafted in Paris.
Meanwhile, those (formerly) rich countries are expected to sacrifice
their jobs, economic growth and tax revenues in the name of preventing
climate and extreme weather catastrophes.

The EPA, NOAA, IPCC, CRU and Meteorology Bureau are acting like
unethical prosecutors, determined to convict carbon dioxide of dangerous
global warming by: basing their case on circumstantial evidence,
allowing tainted evidence, hiding exculpatory evidence, and denying the
defendant the right to present a defense, cross-examine adverse
witnesses, or even offer testimony attesting to the good conduct and
character of defendant – as a vital plant-fertilizing gas that makes all
life on Earth possible.

Thankfully, it’s likely the Paris climate gabfest will result in little
more than a lot of "sound and fury, signifying nothing" – except more
dire fear-mongering about imminent planetary doom, lofty promises of
intent to do something 15-20 years from now to prevent the crisis, and
plans to fly 40,000 delegates and hangers-on to more meetings, in other
delightful destinations replete with 5-star hotels and restaurants.
Billions more will be wasted, but no binding CO2 targets will destroy
energy systems and economies.

The US Senate will not approve or appropriate money for any emission
reductions or climate reparations President Obama might agree to in
Paris. EU nations cannot afford to do so, even if developing countries
agree to binding emission goals – which they will never do. Poor nations
would face open rebellion if they stopped using fossil fuels to lift
billions out of abject poverty, or ceased building the 1,800+ coal-fired
power plants that are under construction or in the planning process in
their countries.

So maybe relax a little on Paris – but keep railing against destructive
climate deals, wind and solar production tax credits, ethanol mandates
and global warming con artists. However, don’t try using those climate
scientist gambits with the Internal Revenue Service.

Via email.

US Candidates Offer Vastly Different Views on Climate Change

As world leaders gather for a major climate conference in Paris, the
U.S. delegation headed by President Barack Obama is pushing for strong,
collaborative action based on the "overwhelming judgment of science,"
but the next administration led by his successor could have very
different views on the issue.

Businessman Donald Trump leads the race for the Republican Party’s
nomination in the 2016 election and has said he does not believe in
climate change or that it is a major problem for the United States.

"I consider it to be not a big problem at all," he said in September. "I
think it’s weather changes. It could be some man-made something, but
you know, if you look at China, they’re doing nothing about it. Other
countries, they’re doing nothing about it." He went further in a Twitter
post this month, saying global warming was created to hurt the
competitiveness of U.S. manufacturing and benefit China.

Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has been rising in recent polls, has the
field’s strongest opposition to scientific claims that the planet has
been getting warmer at a historical pace, as well as plans to change
U.S. energy policy to try to help curb the impact. He said satellite
data has recorded no warming for the past 17 years and that scientists
were "actually adjusting the numbers." He asserted data was being used
to control the economy and energy industry.

According to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(http://www.noaa.gov/), there is "overwhelming scientific evidence that
Earth is warming and a preponderance of scientific evidence that human
activities are the main cause." The agency says the planet is getting
warmer at a faster rate than at any time in the past million years, with
the global average surface temperature progressively rising in each of
the past three decades.

Scientists have warned that letting global temperatures rise more than 2
degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels will bring extreme weather
and rising seas that would affect populations all over the world.
Temperatures are already up almost one degree, mostly since 1976,
according to NOAA.

Protect the economy first

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee
and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul all said the science was not settled
when it came to climate change, with both Bush and Paul saying it was
not clear how much is attributable to humans.

Bush said it would be "really arrogant" to say the science was decided,
and that he would not want to "destroy the American economy" as a
solution.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio, running third in recent polls, agreed with
the idea that confronting climate change should not come at the price of
harming the economy. He cited China as the top carbon producer and said
he would not make it harder for U.S. companies to create jobs for the
sake of policies that would do "nothing to change our climate," in
reference to Obama administration plans.

In August, Obama announced a new plan to reduce carbon emissions by 32
percent below 2005 levels by 2030, and to boost the amount of power
generated by renewable sources to 28 percent of overall power
production.

Power companies already have been converting some of their operations in
recent years, increasing their reliance on natural gas, solar and wind.
As a result, government data has shown a drop in carbon emissions from
coal-burning power plants. Reducing the amount of carbon released into
the atmosphere is a major focus of global efforts to contain the rise in
temperatures.

Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, Vermont Senator Bernie
Sanders and former Maryland governor Martin O’Malley — the three
Democratic presidential candidates — all support Obama’s plan.

Alternative energy and morality

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie said global warming "is real," but
that he did not believe the issue required major government
intervention. He has touted his state’s use of alternative, cleaner
energy sources that he said have grown because of his administration’s
efforts to make them "economically feasible."

Paul agreed on the need to involve solar, wind and hydropower, but that
coal and natural gas should still be major parts of what he called an
"all of the above policy." He said historically there have been times
when the temperature went higher or lower and that at times the carbon
in the atmosphere has been higher.

Neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who is second in the Republican polls, said
there was "always going to be cooling or warming going on," something
that he considered irrelevant. He said the obligation was to protect the
environment.

For Sanders, climate change is "a moral issue."

"Nothing is going to happen unless we are prepared to deal with campaign
finance reform, because the fossil fuel industry is funding the
Republican Party, which denies the reality of climate change," he said
in an October debate .He added that the U.S. needed to be aggressively
working with China, India andRussia.

Clinton, too, cited the need to bring China and India together with the
rest of the world. She said the Paris climate talks needed to bring a
"verifiable commitment to fight climate change from every country
gathered there."

What do you call it when elites fly their private jets to an
international climate change conference to forge a deal with despots
that caps American prosperity without our consent? You call it
progressivism.

It’s estimated that 50,000 carbon-spewing humans participated in the
Paris climate conference. But while President Barack Obama was taking
his working dinner at the three-Michelin-star L'Ambroisie, public
protesters were banned from protesting in the aftermath of the Islamic
terror attacks. Liberté? Not so much.

It took a handful of gunmen only one night to impede free expression in
Paris. Yet according to the president, the 0.1 to 0.2 C of warming we
might see over the next decade — the worst-case scenario predicted by
global warming alarmists — is the biggest crisis facing mankind, worthy
of a massive and expensive curbing effort.

That doesn’t mean Obama won’t use the issue of terrorism to refocus our
attention where it belongs. Millions of people might live in fear and
suffer under the genuine, deadly threat of radical Islam, but the
president contends that the Paris conference itself is "a powerful
rebuke to the terrorists" and an "act of defiance" in the face of
extremism.

Why not? True believers are rarely dissuaded by reality. Socialist
Francois Hollande, president of a country that not only was recently a
target of Islamic terror but also witnessed the bloodiest conflict of
the 20th century, claimed: "Never have the stakes been so high at an
international conference. It’s about the future of the planet, the
future of life." Never?

These are preposterous exaggerations that have as much to do with
history and science as the book of Revelation. But that’s nothing new,
is it? On Wednesday, Obama alleged that without a climate change
agreement, there could be "submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields
that no longer grow" — assertions that are no more than fearmongering,
ratcheted up over the decades by frustrated environmentalists and now
confidently thrown around by presidents. These prophecies are tethered
to reality in the same way Donald Trump’s whoppers are, although the
media treat the former with undeserving respect.

Transforming ideology into a "science" is not a new development on the
left. But the most useful indicators tell us that humanity’s prospects
are on the upswing. Poverty is declining; crops are producing higher
yields; and humans are living longer and healthier lives despite the
mild warming we’ve experienced. And in spite of these advancements (or
maybe because of them), Western leaders are prepared, conveniently
enough, to cap growth, spread wealth and centralize power in the way
progressives have always wanted to cap growth, spread wealth and
centralize power.

The world looks ready for a deal. Developing nations will receive
reparations for the capitalist sins of advanced nations — about $100
billion each year. Corporations will be subsidized so they can create
more unproductive industries to meet arbitrary caps. And the worst
carbon offenders in the world will have to do nothing. What’s not to
like?

If a deal can be reached, Obama will have to trust that Communist China —
the world’s most prodigious carbon emitter — will voluntarily implement
economic restraints about 30 years from now, by which time the U.S.
will have to reach a 26 to 28 percent reduction in greenhouse gas
emissions. Obama will implement regulations to get that done
unilaterally. So China will have more of a say in what happens to our
environmental policy than Congress. But Obama will also negotiate with a
number of other unsavory despots, such as the homicidal Robert Mugabe,
who represents the African position at the Paris negotiations. He will
not, however, bring the deal to Congress, which represents the majority
of the American people.

The Paris agreement might be the biggest, most crucial international
deal the world has ever known, but it is not important enough to be
subjected to the traditional checks and balances of American governance.
Global warming "does not pause for partisan gridlock," the president
explained this summer. In other words, the president does not have to
"pause" for Congress if he feels like using the regulatory state to
implement his preferred partisan policy.

This kind of circumvention will be cheered by those who once feigned
indignation when prior presidents abused executive power. This is really
important, as you know. Obama hopes "to make climate change policy the
signature environmental achievement of his, and perhaps any,
presidency," said an approving New York Times editor. Progressives are
perfectly content to surrender freedoms to fight global warming —
perfectly content to give the executive branch unprecedented power to
"act." And when the private jets come back and the pretend offsets are
cashed in and the moralizing begins, you will know they did it for your
own good.

AS predicted, the great Paris global warming conference has turned to custard.

China, which is home to more billionaires than any other nation, and
India, second only to China in terms of population, along with a gaggle
of other opportunistic nations are demanding hundreds of ­billions of
dollars from the ­developed world to meet the unproven challenge of
man-made climate change.

With breathtaking arrogance, the clamorous pseuds gathered in the French
capital without care for their massive carbon footprint claim to have
the power to control the temperature of Earth — given enough of your
money. This is such a preposterous notion that no one at the conference
will even state the ­obvious — its impossibility.

The more than 4000 ­delegates and assorted hangers-on are actually
perpetuating the greatest fraud since we were warned that the Y2K bug
would send aircraft into tailspins, freeze elevators, close bank
accounts and crash the internet (warmist Al Gore’s claimed invention).

The mere fact that these junketeers have gathered when, according to
satellite data, there has been no warming for more than 18 years, should
have been enough to warn politicians off but no, Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull has paraded his moral vanity (and a warm overcoat) at the
conference and there is no shortage of others eager to be associated
with the ­delusionists.

The demand by developing nations that the developed ­nations hand over
cash should have been met with a Western walkout. It’s nothing but
greenmail.

Led by Christiana Figueres, the executive secretary of the UN’s
Framework Convention on Climate Change, (UNFCCC) the G77 countries
(there were originally 77 developing nations in this bloc when it formed
in 1963; now there are 134) are demanding more than $US100 billion a
year to help them meet any targets set in Paris. This seems to be
their prerequisite just for turning up.

The UNFCCC is the parent treaty of the 2005 Kyoto ­Protocol. Initially
27 developed nations pledged $10.2 billion to "stabilise greenhouse gas
­concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will ­prevent
dangerous human ­interference with the climate system" — as meaningless a
piece of rhetoric as the UN ever presented — but Figueres determined
that wouldn’t be enough.

Using figures from the UN’s now discredited computer ­climate models,
she claimed that amount wouldn’t be ­sufficient to prevent global
temperatures from increasing by 2 degrees Celsius by the end of the
century.

But Figueres has also admitted that the real goal of the gathered
eco-freaks should be to ­destroy capitalism which she sees as the real
enemy of the planet despite obvious evidence that it has been the only
economic model to deliver real development and uplift billions from
poverty in ­history.

Earlier this year, she outlined her thoughts for the Paris conference
saying: "This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are
setting ­ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of
time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning
for at least 150 years, since the Industrial ­Revolution.

"This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves,
which is to ­intentionally transform the economic development model for
the first time in human ­history."

According to an 86-page draft proposal prepared for the conference, the
developed countries have the greatest ­responsibility to cut carbon
emissions "without conditions".

Australia just cannot afford to be a signatory to such ­lunacy.
"Developed countries shall provide financial resources to developing
country parties for the full and enhanced ­implementation of the
(Climate Change) Convention," according to the draft. "The GCF
(Green Climate Fund) shall be the main financial entity under the new
agreement," it added.

The GCF is merely a mechanism to redistribute wealth from developed
countries to poorer nations in order "to promote the paradigm shift
­towards low-emission and ­climate-resilient development pathways".

The draft calls for developed countries to provide "at least 1 per cent
of gross domestic product per year from 2020 and additional funds
­during the pre-2020 period to the GCF," which would act as the "main
operating entity of the Financial Mechanism" under the new treaty,
according to the draft.

Forget it. Taxpayers should demand that Turnbull call Paris and tell the
Australian delegation to get out to Charles de Gaulle airport tout
suite and fly home. Unfortunately, he has yet to show any spine when it
comes to confronting the Left. It is not in his nature.

Disappointingly, his wife, Lucy, the newly appointed chairman of the
Greater Sydney Commission, is also ­displaying the same tendencies. She
is on the board of the Leftist think tank the Grattan Institute.

Little wonder that Liberals are concerned about the direction their party is taking under Turnbull’s leadership.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

7 December, 2015

What Will All The Hot Air In Paris Actually Do?

Bjorn Lomborg

Negotiators and activists are getting increasingly serious about the
prospects of finalizing a carbon-cutting deal here in Paris. No doubt if
they are successful we will see much back-slapping and exhortations of
“success” in 7 days. But the bonhomie will hide a rather inconvenient
truth: even if it’s successful, any deal negotiated in Paris is going to
do very little to rein in temperature rises.

In a recent peer-reviewed research paper, I looked at all the
carbon-cutting promises countries committed to ahead of Paris (their
so-called “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” or INDCs) for
the years 2016-2030. These are what the global treaty will be based on
(along with a bunch of hot air about what might happen outside those
dates – something that’s easy for politicians of today to talk about,
but that we just can’t take seriously).

What I found when I looked at the national promises was that they will cut global temperatures by just 0.05°C (0.09°F) by 2100.

And even if every government on the planet not only keeps every Paris
promise, reduces all emissions by 2030, shifts no emissions to other
countries, but also keeps these emission reductions throughout the rest
of the century, temperatures will be reduced by just 0.17°C (0.3°F) by
the year 2100.

And let’s be clear, that is incredibly – probably even ridiculously –
optimistic. Consider the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, never ratified
by the US, and eventually abandoned by Canada and Russia and Japan.
After several renegotiations, the Kyoto Protocol had been weakened to
the point that the hot air left from the collapse of the Soviet Union
exceeded the entire promised reductions, leaving the treaty essentially
toothless.

The only reason any of the Kyoto goals were almost achieved was the
global 2008 recession. Moreover, emissions were just shifted from one
country to another. The EU, the most climate-engaged bloc, saw an
increase in its emission imports from China alone equaling its entire
domestic CO? reductions. In total, 40% of all emissions were likely
shifted away from the areas that made promises.

Of course, Paris has been talked up by the likes of the UNFCCC’s
Christiana Figueres, very busy here in Paris, who says: “the INDCs have
the capability of limiting the forecast temperature rise to around 2.7
degrees Celsius by 2100.”

That entirely misrepresents reality. The 2.7°C essentially assumes that
although governments do little in Paris then right after 2030 they will
embark on incredibly ambitious climate reductions, thus getting us to
2.7°C. That way of thinking is similar to telling the deeply indebted
Greeks that just making the first repayment on their most pressing loans
will put them on an easy pathway to becoming debt-free. It completely
misses the point.

Figueres’ own organization estimates the Paris promises on the table
will reduce emissions by 33Gt CO? in total. To limit rises to 2.7°C,
about 3,000Gt CO? would need to be reduced – or about 100 times more
than the Paris commitments.

Negotiators here in Paris are trying to tackle global warming in the
same way that has failed for 30 years: by making promises that are
individually expensive, will have little impact even in a hundred years
and that many governments will try to shirk from.

The real goal here isn’t to negotiate a deal, it’s to make an impact on
temperature rises. This approach didn’t work in Kyoto, it didn’t work in
Copenhagen, it hasn’t worked in the other climate conferences or
international gatherings. And regardless of any declarations of success,
it’s not going to happen here in Paris.

Whatever is signed in Paris will not be ratified by the U.S. Senate
so Obama will use the TPP to bypass the Senate in future and enforce his
Green agenda -- so Congress cannot allow it (the TTP) to pass

President Obama will sign on to some form of a climate change treaty in
Paris and he will refuse to submit it to the Senate for ratification.

Why is the lame-duck Obama emboldened to flout the Constitution on this landmark treaty?

The answer lies in Congress's attempt to force the president to bring
his Iran deal to the Senate for ratification. When Republicans decided
to "assert their authority" by passing legislation requiring that Obama
submit the nuclear deal to Congress in a form that could only be
rejected if a two-thirds majority in both chambers were willing to
override his veto, the seeds were sown for Obama's complete disregard
for constitutional treaty powers.

Not coincidentally, during the same timeframe, Obama and Republican
congressional leaders were working overtime to provide the executive
with what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) then called "an
enormous grant of power" by allowing him to fast-track trade deals
through Congress.

These two actions in tandem have set the stage for the imperial Obama
who will sign the treaty, use his regulatory agencies to write rules
based upon it and dare Congress or the courts to stop him.

And it is this experience that will doom Obama's attempt to rewrite the
rules of the world's economy through his recently completed, yet
unsigned, Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Under the rules of fast-track, once Obama signs the TPP, Congress will
be on the clock to have an up-or-down vote in both the House and the
Senate without amendments or filibusters. Into this decision-making mix,
the majority in Congress will be pulling out the stops to stop the
Paris treaty.

TPP matters in this post-Paris climate treaty signature context because
it provides the international framework to enforce the climate change
agreement without any additional congressional approval. The U.S. Trade
Representative's office made the importance of using the TPP to enforce
the green agenda clear in a January 2014 press release when they
declared:

The United States' position on the environment in the Trans-Pacific
Partnership negotiations is this: environmental stewardship is a core
American value, and we will insist on a robust, fully enforceable
environment chapter in the TPP or we will not come to agreement.

Our proposals in the TPP are centered around the enforcement of
environmental laws, including those implementing multilateral
environmental agreements (MEAs) in TPP partner countries, and also
around trailblazing, first-ever conservation proposals that will raise
standards across the region.

There can be little doubt that Obama plans on using the Trans-Pacific
Partnership governance as the means to enforce whatever he agrees to in
Paris on the U.S. all the while our trade partners will ignore it, with
the threat of international trade sanctions imposed against the United
States should Congress or a future president roll back his agenda.

It is also clear that Obama intends to force a ponderous federal court
battle over whether the Paris treaty should be subjected to Senate
ratification, buying him time to move forward with a regulatory agenda
designed to meet the terms of the non-ratified agreement.

Given the likelihood that the TPP governance board (which consists of
one vote for each of the 12 countries who are currently participating)
will act to enforce the Paris climate treaty against the U.S. (but not
themselves) for noncompliance during a Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders
presidency regardless of the will of Congress, the vote on TPP will
become the proxy for Obama's climate agenda.

The truth has always been that the TPP has never been about trade, but
instead has been about a rewriting of the rules of the world economy
negotiated by a president who vowed to fundamentally transform America.
And it is through the TPP that any future president who shares his
vision will be able to finish the transformation and no one in Congress
will be able to stop it.

For years, water, or, more accurately, its scarcity, has been predicted
to be the next doomsday scenario. In 1994, the American Philosophical
Society published a book bearing the title: Is water our next crisis? In
2007, NBC featured: Crisis feared as U.S. water supplies dry up. More
recently, in 2011, NPR did a story on Water: The Epic Struggle for
Wealth, Power and Civilization — a new book in which the author posits:
“water is surpassing oil as the world’s scarcest critical resource.”
This year, a Business Insider (BI) report called “water scarcity
problems” a “looming national issue.” In September, the Associated Press
declared: “The water crisis is already here.”

Hydraulic fracturing is often blamed for exacerbating water concerns.
The BI states: “In Colorado … they’re keeping an eye on the effects of
fracking on the state’s water supply. Using water for fracking could
contribute to local shortages in the drought-prone state.”

Addressing the water problem, NBC offers hope: “Technology holds
promise.” While not specifically referencing fracking, the 2007 feature
couldn’t have predicted how integrally linked ever-improving fracking
technologies and hope for our water woes could be.

Instead of being the perceived problem, the oil-and-gas industry could just be the solution.

Water is important to the hydraulic fracturing process. Fresh water is
used to help transport the tiny grains of sand deep underground where
they are used to hold open the fissures in the fracked rock—allowing the
oil or natural gas to flow at economic rates. When the resource is
extracted, it comes out of the ground with not only the water that was
pumped in, but also with “produced water” from deep in the earth. This
water mixture — that contains both the chemicals used to reduce friction
in the frack job, and very high concentrations of salt, other minerals
and metals — needs to be disposed of.

Historically, the wastewater — which can have as high a ratio as 10
barrels of water for every barrel of oil — has been trucked off-site and
then injected thousands of feet underground into “disposal wells.” The
disposal process is expensive and could potentially be the source of the
spate of small earthquakes being experienced in Oklahoma.

The industry has been in search of a solution that would improve both safety and the bottom line.

Two years ago, I wrote about water reprocessing technologies that were
able to clean the water at the well site so that it could be used again,
and again, for hydraulic fracturing — virtually eliminating wastewater
for many scenarios.

As technology does, it is continuing to improve.

What was “wastewater,” can now have new life irrigating crops in the
arid southwest — or, at least, that is the apparent result of a research
project conducted by the Texas A&M AgriLife Research team, the
Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), and a coalition of oil-and-gas
companies. The initial results look very promising.

Bill Weathersby, Chairman and CEO at Energy Water Solutions — a company
that uses a patented technology to successfully recycle more than 8
million barrels, so far, of wastewater — spearheaded the effort. Katie
Lewis, PhD, designed the experiment at the AgriLife Experimentation
Station near Pecos, TX. Anadarko Petroleum brought the wastewater from a
nearby well and Gibsons provided the tanks to store the water on site.
The RRC permitted the use of the recycled water for the noncommercial
cotton crop, which was planted on June 2, 2015. The size of the project
was designed around the amount of water permitted.

Portions of the controlled field were watered with well water, while
others received a blend of 1 part recycled water and 4 parts well water.
About 30,000 barrels of recycled water were used for the project.

I had the opportunity to see the field, feel the cotton, and talk with
Lewis — who told me the cotton grown with the blended water is doing as
well as the cotton irrigated with well water. Soil analyses have
demonstrated that there should not be adverse effects when irrigating
with the blended water. The cotton will be tested for quality and
strength. The soil will be sampled to be sure there is no contamination.
Full reports on the economic and agricultural aspects will be produced.

Everyone involved is extremely optimistic and enthusiastic about the results.

Commissioner David Porter, RRC Chairman, describes the project as: “An
important first step,” and said it was “a perfect example of the
collaboration we need” and “evidence that free markets do work.”

Assuming the test results are as expected and the project expands next
year, Porter told me the RRC will likely permit more recycled water.
Weathersby hopes more companies will participate in additional testing
to expand the project. Lewis would like to have a test field with
differing ratios of recycled and well water: 4:1, 3:1, 2:1 and 1:1.
Ultimately, participants hope the Texas legislature will use the results
to change the law to allow the use of recycled water for agriculture.

While this project and collaboration are unique, there are many other
companies with water recycling technologies and numerous other tests
being conducted.

One of the new technologies being tested is developed by Kaizen Fluid
Systems and uses an electromechanical process that can break down the
molecular bonding agents to produce clean water with commercially viable
by-products and no toxic waste stream. Kaizen’s system, which is
scalable to meet the client’s needs or volume requirements, is
especially effective in North Dakota’s Bakken Field where the wastewater
disposal costs are very high and produced water is too salty to be
recycled cost effectively by evaporation or reverse osmosis systems.

The type of hydraulic fracturing frequently used in the Bakken, cross
link gel, requires exceptionally clean water with no salt or metals, and
tests found that the Kaizen technology was able to deliver. The model
is currently being scaled up and soon will be available for wide-scale
wellsite use — with the mobile system processing 50 gallons a minute and
the fixed base: 300 gallons per minute or 10,000 barrels (420,000
gallons) per day. Additionally, Sandy McDonald, Kaizen’s CEO, told me
their system removes present and future environmental liabilities for
the producers.

Recycling produced water and reusing it for hydraulic fracturing and/or
agricultural use provides more water for everyone’s use, while
eliminating the need for disposal wells.

The oil-and-gas industry’s search to do things better and more cost
effectively, could provide the answer to America’s water woes.

President Obama’s opening remarks at the Paris climate agreement were
effectively an apology for industrial progress. At the kickoff of the
talks, Obama remarked, “I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the
world’s largest economy and the second-largest emitter, to say that the
United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this
problem; we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”

Obama should not be apologizing for the economic growth that
dramatically improved Americans’ and much of the world’s quality of
life. Instead, the president should apologize for pushing costly and
ineffective climate policies that will make us worse off and trap the
world’s poorest citizens in poverty.

The Cost of Climate Policies

The real problem facing American households and businesses is the Obama
administration’s climate policies. The administration has finalized a
slew of regulations to reduce domestic greenhouse gas emissions. Through
a set of regulations known as the Clean Power Plan, the Environmental
Protection Agency has required states to meet carbon dioxide emissions
reduction goals for existing power plants.

At the same time, the EPA finalized a regulation capping emissions of
carbon dioxide from new power plants so low as to effectively prevent
any coal power plant from running without carbon capture and
sequestration technology (which has yet to be proven feasible). The
federal government also implemented climate regulations on vehicles,
light and heavy-duty trucks, and fracking.

Heritage analysts modeled the cumulative costs of the Obama
administration’s climate agenda by modeling the economic costs of a
carbon tax. Taxing carbon dioxide energy incentivizes businesses and
consumers to change production processes, technologies, and behavior in a
manner comparable to the administration’s regulatory scheme—though
neither regulations nor a tax is good policy. By 2030, Heritage
economists estimate the damage would be:

An average annual employment shortfall of nearly 300,000 jobs

A peak employment shortfall of more than 1 million jobs

A loss of more than $2.5 trillion (inflation-adjusted) in aggregate gross domestic product (GDP)

A total income loss of more than $7,000 (inflation-adjusted) per person

The trade-off that Americans receive for higher electricity rates,
unemployment, and lower levels of prosperity is not an appealing one.
Even though electricity generation accounts for the single largest
source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, the estimated
reduction is minuscule compared to global greenhouse gas emissions.
Therefore, even if you do believe that the Earth is heading to
catastrophic warming, the warming mitigated by the president’s plan
would be barely measurable—unlike the economic consequences.

Is Climate Change a Problem?

This “problem” of climate change is hardly one at all. Natural
variations have altered the climate much more than man has. Proponents
of global action on climate change will argue that 97 percent of the
climatologists agree on climate change. There is significant agreement
among climatologists, even those labeled as skeptics, that the Earth has
warmed moderately over the past 60 years and that some portion of that
warming may be attributed to anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.
However, there is no consensus that temperatures are increasing at an
accelerating rate.

In fact, the available climate data simply do not indicate that the
Earth is heading toward catastrophic warming or more frequent and severe
natural disasters. Quite the opposite. The earth has experienced a
pause in warming since 1998, and data shows that the climate is less
sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas
emissions than the climate models predicted.

Dr. Roger Pielke, a professor at the University of Colorado’s Center for
Science and Technology Policy Research, testified last year, saying:

… there exists exceedingly little scientific support
for claims found in the media and political debate that hurricanes,
tornadoes, floods and drought have increased in frequency or intensity
on climate timescales either in the United States or globally".

In his remarks, Obama stressed that “[n]o nation—large or small, wealthy
or poor—is immune.” Such a sentiment also holds true for climate
policies. Policies that restrict the use of conventional fuels will make
everyone poorer. And it’s the poorest who will suffer most.

Let’s place blame on the policies and regulations that obstruct citizens
around the world from obtaining a better standard of living.

The Paris climate summit (COP21) is underway, and the usual handwringing
over the threat of climate change is unfolding. There’s been the
familiar ‘now or never’ and ‘the end is nigh’ rhetoric, the demand that
Something Must Be Done, and, of course, heightened concern about
countries like China and India’s insistence on coal-powered growth.

Now, Western leaders are much more sympathetic to developing countries
this time around. Barack Obama has said that the responsibility for the
problem of climate change lies most with the developed West. Where
previous conferences were overshadowed by a blame game between developed
and developing countries, commentators insist that this year will be
different. Nevertheless, India and China are still expected to make a
far greater commitment to renewables. In May, the two countries agreed
to invest $22 billion in renewable-energy projects, and Indian president
Narendra Modi unveiled a ‘global solar alliance’ of 120 countries at
COP21.

However, India’s climate plan, which was submitted ahead of the talks,
made clear that coal would continue to play a large role in its
development. In a speech to the COP21, he insisted that Western nations
should offer more investment to make renewables affordable for
developing nations. While climate pundits and negotiators are talking of
a drastic ‘decarbonisation’ of the global economy, Modi’s speech made
clear that he would not be forced to rein in economic growth.

Statements from various world leaders have suggested that achieving a
legally binding target to reduce carbon emissions may well prove
difficult – even though climate commentators appear to be more hopeful.
And, now that China, previously vilified as the world’s No1 polluter,
has won favour for its apparent u-turn on fossil fuels, India is being
painted as the new troublemaker, thwarting negotiators’ goal of doing
away with the coal industry.

Indian officials have made clear their nation’s intention to continue
using coal – and this has sparked tension. According to Time, India’s
insistence on using ‘cheap, dirty electricity’ puts it at odds with the
rest of COP21. A BBC report asked if the Paris conference can ‘overcome
the India challenge’, adding that, ‘if any country embodies the
challenge of reaching an agreement, it is India’.

But India’s defiance is something to be encouraged. Coal is the most
readily available means of motoring the sort of development that India,
and other developing countries, so desperately needs. India has 301
billion tonnes of available coal – the fifth largest reserve in the
world. And it plans to open one mine a month over the next five years.
None of this is a bad thing. Coal is not just a polluter, a source of
carbon emission; it is an abundant energy source – energy that can drive
human activity and push development in low-income countries.

Coal has been crucial to lifting millions out of poverty in India and
China over the past two decades. Building schools and roads, powering
villages, towns and commercial centres, supplying food and sustaining
production – all this depends on readily available energy. Between 2004
and 2011, the number of poor people in India fell from 407million to
269million. Since India won its independence from Britain, life
expectancy has doubled. In 2013, India eradicated the scourge of polio.
All of this is an offshoot of coal-fired development.

Of course there is much further to go. It is unacceptable that in the
21st century millions of Indians still live below the poverty line, and a
quarter of the population still live in darkness without electricity.
But the response to this should be to ramp up energy production. India’s
aim is to produce 1.5 billion tonnes of coal by 2020, a steep rise from
the 600million tonnes that have been produced since 2012, to power
400million homes and sustain the growing economy. Coal is not just some
black stuff in the earth – it has the potential to transform peoples’
lives in the here and now.

Although India has agreed to expand the amount of renewables in its
energy mix, coal is by far the cheapest, most reliable and abundant
source of energy available to meet the scale of demand for development.
Coal costs less than one quarter of the price of oil and natural gas.
According to one report, a hydropower plant in India generates 33 per
cent less electricity than a coal power plant – and coal is also far
cheaper than hydro. The cost of natural gas, considered much cleaner
than other fossil fuels, is 175 per cent higher than current coal
prices. While India proposes to take the lead in solar energy, coal will
be the mainstay of its energy mix for decades to come. Nuclear is
another cheap option, but it is expensive to build nuclear plants, and
India’s technical capacity is still limited.

Indian officials recognise that burning coal can cause pollution, but a
country’s capacity to tackle such problems depends on development.
Richer countries have managed to reduce their dependence on coal and
switch to cleaner fossil fuels, and, in future, they may progress to
even more viable sources.

Most countries at COP21 have taken a far narrower position in relation
to climate change. Against developed countries’ call to limit their
carbon footprint, Modi made a strong statement on the importance of
development. The obsession with carbon output and ‘tipping points’
limits human activity and imagination, rather than expanding it. The
expansion of the human footprint is essential if we are to solve the
problems of the future. For this to happen, we must exploit the
resources that are readily available to us.

They don't want to pay their way. They think that they are so virtuous that other people should give them money

SOLAR rooftop power owners in WA have labelled a proposal to charge them more to be connected to the grid an unfair “sun tax”.

Lyndon Rowe, the chairman of state-owned electricity utility Synergy,
says people who use solar power are not paying the fixed cost of being
connected to the network, leaving other consumers and taxpayers footing
the bill.

“These people have made the sensible decision to invest in clean, abundant energy and should not be penalised,” Mr Turner said.

There are more than 191,000 solar panel owners in WA, accounting for one in five households.

Mr Turner said if they’re hit with extra costs it would risk holding
back investment in renewable energy. “These people have made the
sensible decision to invest in clean, abundant energy and should not be
penalised,” he said. “Targeting solar households is not the way to go.

“Synergy is looking for a scapegoat to cover up for its spiralling budget losses.”

But Mr Rowe said it was fair to target solar panel owners — with the
number growing by 20 per cent each year. “The unfair part is those
subsidies going to people that can afford to pay for electricity,” he
said.

“People having difficulties paying their electricity bills do not have
solar photovoltaic … I’m not suggesting only rich people have solar —
that’s clearly not the case.

“If we don’t change the tariff structure, because of this growing
subsidy the concession they currently get could become at risk.”

Treasurer and Energy Minister Mike Nahan said the State Government would
be reforming tariff systems and it would considered in the next Budget.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

6 December, 2015

How can global warming be a hoax when most important people
everywhere in the world accept it? Surely they can't all be wrong?

When President Eisenhower warned that American politics risked being
captured by a military-industrial complex his warning was widely taken
seriously -- on both the Left and the Right of American politics.

And he had good grounds for his warning: Just about the whole of human
history. The whole of human history is a history of elite
dominance via elite collusion. As far back as we can go, human societies
have mostly been ruled by the King and his barons. The ordinary people
had no say in government at all. There was the Athenian democracy
for a while and then the Roman Republic but neither lasted as the old
ways steadily reasserted themselves. And even those two were very
limited democracies by modern standards

Then out of the woods of Germany emerged primitive hunter-gatherer
tribes whose lifestyle was inimical to centralization and who needed the
co-operation of all to defend themselves from other warring
tribes. So they all had systems of consultation which worked
toward consensus action. Even their system was not a direct
democracy, however. It was a "Senate" ("Witan") of elders who made
the decisions. But the elders really were what the name implied:
Heads of family who really represented their families and could bring
their families with them if common action was required.

And when some of those tribes invaded and took over Romanized Britannia
and made it into England, they brought their ideas of governance with
them. There was some survival of that in Germany too. Even such a
powerful and militaristic state as Prussia had a parliament that not
even Bismarck could ignore for long.

And when, after huge religious struggles, those ideas of governance
became allied with ideas of religious tolerance, the individual in those
lands was freed to think for himself. And that eventually led to
the leap of technological progress in Britain known as the Industrial
Revolution. And when others copied the British model, the Western world
as we know it today was created.

With ups and downs, England has been a democracy of one sort or another
for around 1500 years now -- already lasting 3 times longer than the
Roman Republic.

But "ups and downs" is the word. Britain was on various occasions
theatened by a drift into the sort of tyranny that ruled most of the
world. Along the way, Magna Carta had to be signed and a King
beheaded to defend traditional English liberties.

But the battle has always been a close-run-thing. And even now it has
not been totally won. The graduates of the Greater Public Schools (i.e.
private schools) and the two great universities still run Britain.
The present Prime Minister is an Oxford graduate, as is the Chancellor
of the Exchequer (treasurer, finance minister) and as is the Mayor of
London. Even the recently defeated leader of the Labour party was
an Oxford graduate. So even in Britain, elitism makes only some
compromises with democracy.

Let me point out two examples of how that elitism still rules -- regardless of what the people want.

The classic example is the death penalty for serious crime.
Outside the USA, most Western governments now forbid that penalty
altogether. Yet, as I pointed out long ago,
that is not the popular will. Clear majorities of the national
populations concerned want the death penalty retained. The
elite has over-ridden the popular will.

A rather different but much more pervasive example of elite dominance is
the phenomenon of trade protectionism: taxing imports with
"tariffs". Repeatedly, big business will collude with big labour
to restrict competition from overseas. With both business and
labour lining the pockets of politiciasns, the people are readily
betrayed.

Who does not want to spend less to acquire his purchases if that were
possible? There must be very few of us who don't respond
favourably to the possibility of a "bargain". Yet the whole point
of protectionism is to keep prices up. It takes money out of the
pockets of ordinary people in order to benefit special interest groups.
The elite do what suits them and who cares about the average Joe?

And a very contemporary example of elites defying popular sentiment is
the way the elites worldwide treat popular anger with Muslims and call
it "Islamophobia". An unending sequence of great horrors
done in the name of Allah is not deemed sufficient justification for
criticism of Islam. Anger at Muslim deeds is not only ignored but
actively criminalized. History has seen many examples of whole
populations being expelled for bad reasons so, in a kneejerk way,
Western elites are determined not to let their Muslim populations be
expelled for good reasons.

So we come to global warming: A classical example of elite collusion
over-riding the best interests of the people. Scientists,
journalists and politicians all benefit from the scare so that is what
dictates policy. It is a steamroller that flattens most
opposition. Almost every national leader is bowing down to the
scare in Paris as I write this. And they are doing that in the
context of global warming having stopped over 18 years ago. Here's the
graph:

So on a mere PROPHECY of global warming resuming, the great and the good
of the world are trying to upend the world's electricity supplies.

It is understandable, however, that people with little historical
awareness find implausible the idea that all the serious people
endorsing the scare are just participating in a racket. How can so
many people be getting it wrong, they ask? This little essay is
designed to show them how. Elites regularly co-operate, and when
they do, anything is possible. And scientists, journalists and
politicians all have good reasons to co-operate on this one.

It is basically scientists who keep the whole racket afloat. If
they universally pooh-poohed it, the whole scare would fall apart.
And their support for the scare is well understood in the light of the
old courtroom enquiry: "Cui bono" -- who benefits?

The Holy Grail of scientists is research grants. Without research
grants, they cannot do research and research is their lifeblood.
And the global warming scare has produced a downpour of research grants
onto any scientist working in climate-related fields. They would
be mad to do or say anything to dry up that blessed shower. To use
another metaphor, they would be mad to kill the goose that lays the
golden eggs. So a small and unscrupulous minority actively promote the
myth while most just keep "shtum", but give token support if
demanded.

And the participation of journalists in promoting the scare is perhaps even more easily understood. Scares sell papers.

And the scare suits the political Left extremely well, which is why
belief in it is heavily polarized along political lines. To quote
Obama, Leftists want to "fundamentally transform" the societies in which
they live. And the global warming scare also calls for a complete
upheaval of how we live. Leftism and Warmism are two peas in a
pod.

So elite collusion is nothing new and it's clear what is behind it.
Warmism suits a lot of elite people and it is mainly their voices that
are heard -- JR

Gov’t-Funded Study: Skeptics Are Winning The Global Warming Debate

A government-funded study has bad news for environmentalists: skeptics
are winning the battle to sway public opinion on global warming.

Michigan State University (MSU) researchers gave nearly 1,600
participants fake news articles about global warming — both skeptical
and alarmist — and had them complete surveys about their beliefs on the
issue. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Researchers found none of the alarmist arguments about global warming
changed “core beliefs” on the subject, but survey participants presented
with skeptical arguments said they are more likely to doubt man-made
global warming.

“This is the first experiment of its kind to examine the influence of
the denial messages on American adults,” says Aaron McCright, an MSU
sociologist and the study’s lead author. “Until now, most people just
assumed climate change deniers were having an influence on public
opinion. Our experiment confirms this.”

The study comes as President Barack Obama meets with world leaders in
Paris to negotiate a global agreement to cut carbon dioxide emissions —
the greenhouse gas blamed for rising temperatures. Obama warns that “no
nation — large or small, wealthy or poor — is immune to what this
means.”

World leaders met Monday to kick off the United Nations 21st climate
summit, and hopes are high a global agreement on CO2 cuts will be
reached. But Obama seems more concerned about global warming than the
Americans he represents.

A November Fox News poll finds only 3 percent of American voters listed
global warming as their top concern, down from 5 percent in August. Only
6 percent of Democrats listed global warming as their top concern,
compared to 1 percent of Republicans.

American voters are much more concerned with issues like terrorism,
immigration and the economy over global warming. McCright’s research
seems to add to evidence that people aren’t being convinced the world is
headed for environmental catastrophe.

“That’s the power of the denial message,” says McCright. “It’s extremely
difficult to change people’s minds on climate change, in part because
they are entrenched in their views.”

Most shockingly, McCright finds both conservatives and liberals are more
likely to become skeptics when presented with arguments doubting
man-made global warming. Even when researchers put up fake news stories
arguing the positives of global warming, liberals and conservatives
aren’t convinced.

“Medical experts argue that dealing with climate change will improve our
public health by reducing the likelihood of extreme weather events,
reducing air quality and allergen problems, and limiting the spread of
pests that carry infectious diseases,” reads one fake news article on
the alleged health impacts of global warming.

On the other hand, negative messaging on global warming — trying to
frame it as a conspiracy of the left — was able to get liberals and
conservatives to become skeptics, or become further entrenched in their
already skeptical views.

“However, most conservative leaders and Republican politicians believe
that so-called climate change is vastly exaggerated by
environmentalists, liberal scientists seeking government funding for
their research and Democratic politicians who want to regulate
business,” reads on of the fake articles on global warming skeptics.

Hannity on Obama’s Climate Change Claim: I Have a Whole List of Threats Bigger Than Climate Change

On his show Tuesday, nationally syndicated radio host Sean Hannity
argued against Obama’s claim at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference that,
“It’s hard to come up with a tougher problem than climate change.”

“Now here’s an interesting side note to all of this.
All these people are going into Paris, and the president’s flight, a
whopping 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide is going to be churned out
during this two week climate change summit that began yesterday in
Paris.

“Now the bump in dangerous greenhouse gas comes—get
this—50,000 people, including the media, world leaders, the Anointed
One, gathering to discuss ways to wean the world off fossil fuel.

“By the way we’ve already discovered that here in
this country, and I’ve actually talked about that on the program
yesterday, that the U.S. has radically cut CO2 emissions, even though
the president is apologizing for us being the second largest emitter in
the world.

“But we cut back CO2 emissions more than any other
country since 2006 according to the International Energy Agency, and
emissions today are back to 1992 levels. And by the way, back then we
had 50 million fewer people in this country. A lot of them are
undocumented, but that’s a whole other story. A whole other argument for
a whole other day.

“But this president, himself, flying to the beautiful
City of Lights, emitted roughly 189 tons of carbon alone. The bump in
dangerous gas, 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide will be churned out going
to and from the summit.

“The president’s trip alone will burn 19,275 gallons
of jet fuel. His entire trip will send more carbon dioxide into the air
than the combined emissions of 31 U.S. homes over the span of a year.”

By Freeman Dyson (Freeman Dyson is professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.)

REPRESENTATIVES FROM 196 countries are in Paris to negotiate an
agreement about climate change, specifically a reduction in greenhouse
gas emissions. But the basic beliefs of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, which is organizing the talks, are questionable, and
any binding agreement would likely do more harm than good.

The IPCC believes climate change is harmful; that the science of climate
change is settled and understood; that climate change is largely due to
human activities, particularly the release of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere by industrial societies; and that there is an urgent need to
fight climate change by reducing the emissions of carbon dioxide.

The most questionable of these beliefs is the notion that the science of
climate change is settled and understood. The biggest of all climate
changes have been the ice ages, which have covered half of North America
and Europe with kilometer-thick sheets of ice. Ice ages happened
repeatedly in the past, and we are about due for another one to start. A
new ice age would be a disaster far greater than anything we have to
fear from climate warming. There are many theories of ice ages, but no
real understanding. So long as we do not understand ice ages, we do not
understand climate change.

Another important thing that we do not understand is the possible effect
of the sun on climate. The sun’s magnetic activity is strongly
variable, and it appears to be correlated with the earth’s climate. When
the sun is magnetically active, climate gets warmer. We do not know how
much of the warming is caused by the sun. If the effect of the sun is
large, any effort to control climate change by human action is futile.

The environmental movement is a great force for good in the world, an
alliance of billions of people determined to protect birds and
butterflies and preserve the natural habitats that allow endangered
species to survive. The environmental movement is a cause fit to fight
for. There are many human activities that threaten the ecology of the
planet. The environmental movement has done a great job of educating the
public and working to heal the damage we have done to nature. I am a
tree-hugger, in love with frogs and forests. But I am horrified to see
the environmental movement hijacked by a bunch of climate fanatics, who
have captured the attention of the public with scare stories. As a
result, the public and the politicians believe that climate change is
our most important environmental problem. More urgent and more real
problems, such as the over-fishing of the oceans and the destruction of
wild-life habitat on land, are neglected, while the environmental
activists waste their time and energy ranting about climate change. The
Paris meeting is a sad story of good intentions gone awry.

The most important fact in the history of the 21st century is that China
and India, with about half of the world’s population, are getting rich.
To get rich in the next 50 years, they must burn prodigious quantities
of coal and add big quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.
China and India have a simple choice to make. Either they get rich and
cause a major increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Or they stay poor.
I hope they choose to get rich. The choice is theirs and not ours.
Whatever we may choose to do will not make much difference. The
discussions in Paris will not make much difference. The good news is
that the main effect of carbon dioxide on the ecology of the planet has
nothing to do with climate. The main effect of carbon dioxide is to make
the planet greener, feeding the growth of green plants of all kinds,
increasing the fertility of farms and fields and forests.

As hard as it sounds, someone actually managed to outperform Barack
Obama for stupidest comment award at the UN climate summit. Bill Nye,
who’s commonly known as “The Science Guy” — or “The Science Lie” in our
humble shop — spewed more pompous rhetoric in an interview with the
Huffington Post. “It’s very reasonable,” he asserted, “that the recent
trouble in Paris is a result of climate change.”

Recall Obama’s remark earlier this week: “We salute the people of Paris
for insisting this crucial conference go on. An act of defiance that
proves nothing will deter us from building the future we want for our
children. What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world
than marshaling our best efforts to save it.”

Both comments are asinine, but Nye’s is downright astonishing.

“There’s water shortage in Syria, this is fact-based,” Nye went on to
explain. “Small and medium farmers have abandoned their farms because
there’s not enough water, not enough rainfall. And especially the young
people who have not grown up there, have not had their whole lives
invested in living off the land, the young people have gone to the big
cities looking for work. There’s not enough work for everybody, so the
disaffected youths … are more easily engaged and more easily recruited
by terrorist organizations, and then they end up part way around the
world in Paris shooting people.”

“You can say, ‘Well stamp out the terrorists,’” he concluded. “But if
everybody’s leaving their farms because of water shortages, that’s a
little bigger problem.”

This isn’t the first time Nye’s made ridiculous surmises. This is the
same person who last November blamed anomalous lake-effect snowfall on
climate change, absurdly suggesting: “Everybody, when Lake Erie’s
warmer, more water evaporates into the air and it snows more. I don’t
make the rules, people.” Only Lake Erie was sitting at four degrees
below average at the time. Oops. Just two months later, in January 2015,
he again blamed a major nor'easter on man-made global warming without a
shred of evidence.

Any rational scientists knows that long-term precipitation patterns
naturally fluctuate. What does Nye believe is driving Boko Haram, the
Nigerian terrorist group whose country has been abnormally wet for the
last two decades? But that’s the problem — he’s not a rational
scientist. As meteorologist Joe Bastardi recently opined, “[T]he fact is
[Nye] is not a man of science. He is an actor. That is his profession.”
As are most politicians. And so far, they are doing a terrible job
convincing the public that global warming is “our greatest national
security threat.” And with comments like these, it’s no wonder.

President Obama has been mocked and appropriately so for his ludicrous
comment that the upcoming climate change summit in Paris will be a
“powerful rebuke” to the terrorists. No. This summit is a powerful
rebuke to common sense.

It says a lot about the lack of clarity and commitment to the growing
threat of the Islamic State that the world leaders are gathering in the
city where the murderous attacks just happened with the blood barely dry
and the prime topic off discussion will be stopping the rise of the
oceans.

Amazingly, the White House then wonders why so few voters have any trust in his handling of the terrorism crisis.

The concern isn’t just that climate change derangement syndrome has such
an obsessive grip over this president and other world leaders that they
choose to take their eye off the ball. It’s worse than that: the entire
global warming agenda is an impediment to the war against terror.

One of our most effective economic swords to use against ISIS — and
Iran, Putin’s Russia, and OPEC — is America’s vast shale oil and gas
reserves as well as our 500 years worth of domestic coal resources. This
point should be self-evident: Every barrel of oil we produce here at
home is one less barrel we have to purchase from abroad.

We know from intelligence reports that the Islamic State receives as
much as one-half billion dollars a year in petro-dollars. ISIS’s access
to Middle Eastern oil finances a growing army of terrorists that are
well armed, trained and coordinated to wreak havoc on the western world.

Why then do we continue to buy oil from those who are trying to kill us?
That’s especially crazy given that we now have the capacity to achieve
real energy independence within five years by pursuing a pro-America
energy development strategy.

Our own Energy Information Administration reports that we have access to
more recoverable fossil fuel resources than any nation in the world
thanks to the new and ever-improving smart drilling technologies. We
have hundreds of billions of barrels of oil underneath us, and by 2020
we can and should become the energy dominant nation in the world. This
could be an economic and geopolitical game-changer, yet President Obama
recently nonsensically declared in a speech on climate change that we
should keep these resources in the ground.

No matter how severe one believes the threat of global warming, the
inescapable reality is that for at least the next decade and even with a
rapid conversion to renewable energy, the United States and the rest of
the world will continue to heavily rely on oil, natural gas and coal
for about two-thirds of our transportation fuel and electricity. If we
don’t produce our vast domestic fossil fuel energy, the world will buy
oil and natural gas from somewhere else — and the terrorist networks
will grow richer and more militant.

This may be inconvenient truth, but it’s an economic reality. Another
inconvenient reality is that regardless of what the United States does
to force-feed expensive and unreliable green energy on our economy, the
rest of the world is building hundreds of new coal plants every year and
drilling for oil wherever they can find it.

Mr. Obama could and should announce several emergency steps either with
the stroke of a pen or with congressional approval to make America less
reliant on terrorist oil and the blood money that too often goes with
it.

First, immediately repeal the 1970s law that prohibits the exporting of
American gas and oil. Doing so could increase U.S. production by as much
as $50 to $100 billion annually.

Next, build the Keystone XL Pipeline and many other pipelines awaiting
government approval so we can safely and swiftly transport North
American oil to the markets where it is needed. This could create
thousands of high-paying union jobs as well.

We should also allow drilling on federal non-environmentally sensitive
lands. More than 90 percent of the drilling boom has been on private
lands. Use the royalties to retire some of our debt and for an
anti-terrorism fund.

Finally, suspend some of the more strident EPA rules that are shutting
down our coal producers across the nation even as Asia is building 500
new coal plants this year alone.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

The UN Climate Change Conference in Paris would have us all terrified about the future of the environment. Here's why I'm not

Christopher Booker

Yesterday, President Obama and a phalanx of other world leaders joined
40,000 delegates in Paris for the formal opening of what has been billed
as “one of the most important international conferences in history”.

Its aim is to win agreement on a plan that would halt global warming, by
holding down temperatures to 2 degrees C above their pre-industrial
level.

They want “a binding treaty” committing the world’s nations to make
massive cuts in their emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon
dioxide (CO2).

For 30 years we have been told how, thanks to the dramatic rise in CO2,
temperatures have been soaring to unprecedented levels. This is causing
polar ice to melt, sea-levels to rise and has brought a dangerous
increase in “extreme weather events”, such as hurricanes, heatwaves,
droughts and floods.

Nothing has been more influential in promoting this “consensus” view
than a succession of reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC). These are based on computer models which predict
that, unless the world abandons fossil fuels, temperatures will rise
through the 21st century by 0.3 degrees per decade. Indeed by 2100 they
could even have soared by as much as 5 degrees.

So what could be wrong about the world’s nations getting together to prevent such a disaster before it is too late?

In fact, in more recent years scarcely a single point in this
“consensus” theory has not been questioned by a growing array of
independent experts, including some of the most eminent scientists in
the world.

Here are 10 of the claims made by those gathered in Paris, with commentary on just how far their fears are really justified:

1. Thanks to the rise in CO2 emissions, we are faced with a rise in global temperatures never before seen in history

It is true that when the alarm over global warming was set off in the
1980s and 1990s, the world was undoubtedly hotting up, apparently in
tandem with an inexorable rise in CO2. But this rise in temperatures was
not unprecedented. The world has in fact been heating up for 200 years,
ever since it emerged from what climatologists call the “Little Ice
Age’ when, between 1350 and 1800, it markedly cooled. The temperature
rise of 0.5 degrees C between 1975 and 1998, hailed as “the hottest year
in history” was no greater than that recorded between 1910 and 1940,
before “global warming” was thought of.

The graph by Phil Jones of East Anglia University’s Climatic Research
Unit shows that the late 20th century temperature rise was very similar
to that between 1910 and 1940

2. But what about the so-called “Pause”, the claim by “climate
sceptics”, that after 1998, temperatures again fell, and have shown no
rising trend since?

It is true that some surface temperature records have continued to rise,
showing 2010 and 2014 as even hotter than 1998. But the much more
comprehensive temperature measurements made by satellites have shown a
very different picture. Since falling back after 1998, the rising trend
in temperatures has for 17 years come to a halt – what even the IPCC
accept as “the Pause”.

The significance of this stalling of the temperature rise is that it was
not predicted by any of those IPCC computer models, programmed to
predict that, as CO2 continued to rise, temperatures must inevitably
follow. Even fervent supporters of the “consensus” have found this hard
to explain, and have had to admit that natural factors, such as changes
in solar radiation and ocean currents have much more influence on
climate than their computer models allowed for.

3. The overall temperature rise of the past 200 years has been wholly
unprecedented, and the C02 emitted since the start of the industrial
revolution must still be a major factor

Nothing more troubled the supporters of the “consensus” theory than
worldwide evidence that 1,000 years ago the world was even hotter than
it is today: what climatologists call “the Medieval Warm Period”.

But in 1999 this led to the producing of a new graph, nicknamed “the
Hockey Stick” and heavily promoted by the IPCC, which rewrote climate
history. This purported to show that the Medieval Warm Period had never
existed, and that temperatures had suddenly shot up in the late 20th
century to 1998 as “the hottest year in history”.

Expert computer analysts then demonstrated, however, that the methods
used to construct this graph were hopelessly flawed. It became the most
discredited artefact in scientific history. The Medieval Warm Period was
back, showing that the heating up of the world 1,000 years ago had
nothing to do with human CO2 emissions and was entirely natural.

4. Two recent studies have shown that “97 per cent of all climate
scientists” still believe in man-made global warming. How can this
evidence be denied?

It is true that no statistic has been quoted more often by supporters of
the “consensus” than this, including President Obama. But analysis of
how these two studies were conducted have shown them as even more dodgy
than the “Hockey Stick”.

The first was based on a survey by a student for a Master’s degree. Of
her original sample of 10,257 scientists, she eventually identified only
77 as bona-fide “climate scientists”, all but two of whom had endorsed
the “consensus” view on man-made climate change. Hence her “97 per
cent”. But this represented only 0.007 percent of her original sample.

When another academic, John Cook, attempted to produce a more convincing
result, based on a sample of 4,011 academic papers, he claimed that “97
percent” of them endorsed the “consensus” that “humans are the primary
cause of recent global warming”. But closer examination showed that only
65 papers argued that man-made CO2 was responsible for more than half
of the warming. Cook’s true percentage should have been far, far
smaller.

Ever since 2007, when Arctic summer ice hit a record low, we have been
warned that summer ice in the Arctic ocean is melting so fast that that
it will soon be “ice free”. But repeatedly the date when this would come
about has been moved forward. In fact, since 2007 satellite
measurements have shown the ice recovering, until in 2013 less of it
melted than at any time for nine years. In 2013 and 2014,
according to the European Space Agency, the volume of Arctic ice jumped
back by more than 30 per cent.

Even more remarkable, however, is what has been happening at the other
end of the world. In recent years the extent of sea ice around
Antarctica has been greater than at any time since Nasa’s satellite
records began in 1979. A recent Nasa study showed that the mass of ice
and snow covering the 5th largest continent on earth has been growing
dramatically.

In recent years the extent of sea ice around Antarctica has been greater
than at any time since Nasa’s satellite records began in 1979

In fact there is as much polar ice in the world today than at any time
since satellite measurements began in 1979. As for those polar bears,
they are doing absolutely fine. Experts such as biologist Dr Susan
Crockford who rely on direct observation rather than computer models
agree that their numbers are well up on where they were 40 years ago.

6. Global sea levels are still rising – so worryingly that little island
nations like Kiribati, Tuvalu and the Maldives may soon have vanished
beneath the waves

Despite the best efforts of those supporting the “consensus” to use
their computer models to claim otherwise, all direct evidence indicates
that if anything these “small island states” are not shrinking but
actually growing in size.

According to one study, the main atoll on Kiribati has recently been
increasing its area by up to 4 per cent or more for four decades

As for the Maldives, where their former President famously staged a
Cabinet meeting under water to publicise his country’s plight, Dr Niklas
Morner, a former president of the International Commission on Sea Level
Changes, says that in 40 years of studying their tide gauges and
shorelines, he has observed no sea level rise at all.

7. No evidence for the impact of climate change is more alarming than
the increase in “extreme weather events”, such as heatwaves, storm,
droughts, floods and hurricanes

Again, however often we are told this – as we are by the BBC and others
every time there is a disastrous heatwave, flood or cyclone somewhere in
the world – even the IPCC itself had to concede this in its latest
report that there is no hard evidence that any of these things are
becoming more frequent or intense than they were previously.

As for droughts, one comprehensive study showed that, far from becoming
worse as the 20th century progressed, they actually became rarer. Of the
last century’s “30 major drought episodes”, 22 were in the first six
decade. The two decades between 1961 and 1980 produced just five. The
final two decades, when the global warming scare was taking off, saw
only two.

8. Terrible hurricanes and cyclones like Katrina and Erica give clear
proof of how global warming is bringing us more deadly storms.

The curious thing is that, however much these storms may make global
headlines, not one has broken any records from the days before global
warming was heard of.

In fact the evidence shows that in the past 45 years the world has seen
no increase in the frequency or intensity of such storms at all.

9. It’s still better to rely on “renewable energy” than fossil fuels

Christiana Figueres, the UN’s “climate chief” and organiser of this
week’s conference argues that, even if global warming is not taking
place as fast as predicted, it would still be sensible to “decarbonise”
the world’s economy and rely on renewables, because fossil fuels are a
finite resource.

Ms Figueres argues that not only should richer countries abandon their
dependence on coal, oil and gas, to rely on renewables, they should also
be prepared to pay “$1 trillion a year” to help poorer countries
develop their economies on the same lines.

But, despite all the hundreds of billions of dollars, euros and pounds
Western countries have already put into windfarms and solar panels, the
results are not, so far, encouraging, According to the BP Statistical
Review of World Energy, wind turbines are currently supplying only 1.2
per cent of the world’s energy. The contribution from solar is just 0.3
per cent. To realise Ms Figueres’s dream, we still have some way to go.

10. The Paris summit will come up with a result: a binding treaty that will change the world

Unlikely. China, already responsible for 50 per cent of all the world’s
CO2 emissions, has made clear that it now plans to double them within 15
years. India, the third largest emitter, insists that it will treble
its CO2 output by 2030.

The story from most of the other major “developing countries”, such as
Russia, Brazil, South Korea and Vietnam, is much the same. Not one of
them has any intention of reducing its “carbon emissions”.

The best they can offer is that, if Western countries want them to build
more windmills and solar farms, we must be prepared to pay them to do
so out of a “Green Climate Fund”, which the UN plans by 2020 to be
handing out $100 billion a year. Pledges so far amount to just $700
million. We still have $99.3 billion to go.

However much the EU and President Obama may huff and puff, and however
much they may end up with a meaningless fudge of an “agreement”, the
binding treaty they want is simply not going to happen. Now or ever.

But don’t worry. This won’t have the slightest effect on the world’s
climate. We shall just have to go on putting up with whatever nature
sends us – as we have had to do throughout history.

The Paris climate scam treaty about wealth redistribution, nothing more

“Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn,
developing countries are allowed to grow. The lifestyles of a few must
not crowd out opportunities for the many still on the first steps of the
development ladder.”

That was Narendra Modi, Prime Minister of India, writing in the Financial Times on Nov. 29 on the new Paris climate treaty.

Here, Modi explains why India and other developing economies should be
given unfair economic advantages over the West as a matter of treaty
law, and why the Paris agreement should treat his country differently
than ours.

Not that anyone can blame him. The treaty stinks.

And yet, no more concise explanation of the current state of the global
economy exists. Global climate pacts, like that being negotiated in
Paris, or even trade agreements, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership are
designed with one intention: To redistribute wealth globally.

That is, to hamper growth in the West by continuing to increase the cost
of doing business, and continuing to shift production to so-called
developing economies like China or India.

There may not be much more to it than that.

Sure, it is shrouded in all sorts of happy talk like saving the planet
or creating jobs, all the while carbon emissions targets are never met
and the jobs are still nowhere to be found.

Global emissions will still increase 25 percent in the next 20 years
based on continued growth in emerging markets, the BP Energy Outlook
2035 finds.

Meanwhile, the employment-population ratio in the U.S. of the working
age population — 16 to 64 years old — still has not recovered from the
last recession, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows.

In 2007, the percent of the non-seasonally adjusted working age
population with jobs averaged 71.8 percent. Today it stands at 68.9
percent, representing 6.4 million potential jobs that have been lost in
the past 8 years alone.

The U.S. via the Environmental Protection Agency and other federal
government agencies is one of the most heavily regulated economies in
the world. Rules have been put forth with the singular intention of
restricting coal-fired electricity plants, to reduce our output on the
grid. In the process, electricity becomes more expensive. In the
meantime, labor costs here are prohibitively high. Why build a factory
in the U.S.?

All because world trade rules and these silly climate agreements grant
favors — special and differential treatment — to developing economies
like India.

Why would we continue with an approach that already subsidizes foreign
competition with unfair rules, and then offer them even more subsidies
on top of that? Because “justice demands it”?

Yes, it creates an opportunity for lower cost investment in certain
quarters, which, if you know the right people or where to look, could be
very lucrative from an investment standpoint.

But with the loss of productive capacity and the ability to employ one’s
own citizens to do jobs, it is insane from a national standpoint to
continue making these bad deals.

Sometimes if something sounds like a scam, or too good to be true, it
usually is. This is a scam through and through that will saddle the U.S.
with a higher cost of business and fewer jobs, and redistribute wealth
overseas. Why would we do that?

The emotional David Suzuki makes “Big Foot” size carbon
footprint to attend Ottawa rally —- to tell attendees to drive and fly
less

Like most progressives, David Suzuki believes in one set of rules for himself, and another set of rules for the rest of us.

This week Suzuki flew all the way to Ottawa from Vancouver to attend a
climate change rally. He was joined by thousands of other believers who
were bused in from outside Ottawa. Did I mention their bus was left
idling while they tended to the important business of listening to
people like Suzuki lecture everyone else about climate change?

According to offsetters.ca a website that lets people pay their climate
guilt through offsets, his flight to Ottawa spewed out nearly two tons
of carbon emissions which is almost a quarter of the average Canadian’s
yearly output.

Why didn’t Suzuki send a video message instead of flying across the
country for a few minutes of speaking and a photo op? The protestors
ended their march on Parliament Hill where a large TV screen was parked,
running off of a truck and generator, showing images of other climate
change rallies, so it shouldn’t have been too difficult to “connect” all
these individuals who are so worried about climate change.

When you tally up all of the jet-setting Suzuki and other progressive
heroes do, I can only conclude they don’t really mean what they say.
They just believe in lecturing the rest of us, trying to control us and
making government bigger so they can push their agenda on us.

But don’t expect them to change any time soon because with progressives, it’s always just more “do as I say, not as I do”.

The EPA announced updated renewable fuel standards this week, choosing
to perpetuate the travesty that is ethanol rather than let the overhyped
fuel additive die the death it so richly deserves. The new standards,
though lower than originally mandated in 2007, are still high enough to
place undue pressure on energy producers and consumers, which will
ultimately pay the price in higher gas prices.

The new EPA regulations mandate that companies will have to blend 18.11
billion gallons of corn-based ethanol into gasoline in 2016. This is up
from the 17.4-billion-gallon mark proposed in May, but down from the
22.25 billion gallons the 2007 guidelines required. As a consequence,
nearly everyone is upset.

Ethanol producers and farmers claim the numbers represent a shift away
from renewable fuels. Bob Stallman of the American Farm Bureau
Federation, told The Wall Street Journal he was disappointed to see the
EPA “move forward with a decision that will stall growth and progress in
renewable fuels.”

Jeff Broin, head of Poet LLC, an ethanol producer, said, “[T]hese
numbers fall well short of our capacity to provide clean, domestic
ethanol to America’s drivers.”

On the other side, gasoline refiners expressed optimism about the lower
standards, but remain concerned that the mandate still exists at all.
“Today’s rule is further proof that the [renewable-fuel standard]
program is irreparably broken and that the only solution is for Congress
to repeal it outright,” said Chet Thompson, president of the American
Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers, an industry trade group.

Fully 10% of gasoline consumption in the U.S. comes from biofuels, and
nearly all of that is corn-based ethanol. The latest numbers mandated by
the EPA push the ethanol quota to the “blend wall,” the point at which
the oil industry believes the amount mandated exceeds the amount that
can realistically and safely be blended into the gasoline supply.

There is also concern that the vast quantity of ethanol being added to
gasoline will have an adverse effect on the vehicles and small equipment
that is running on the fuel additive. Environmentalists and corn-based
ethanol producers have brushed off these concerns as overblown. Tell
that to the consumers making trips to the repair shop because of
ethanol-damaged engines.

The mandates may also be tied to the gas-price bubble that is costing
consumers billions. Gas prices routinely rise and fall based on the
price of oil, but, while the price of crude oil has fallen close to 50%
in the past year, the price of a gallon of gas has only fallen 28%. This
amounts to a pricing disparity in which drivers are paying $1 billion
more for gas than they would have if the typical market pattern was in
place.

Refiners have been keeping a larger chunk of profits by spending less
for oil, but federal taxes and the additional manufacturing cost of
adding ethanol to gasoline are also part of the problem. “The gap is
higher than it has been since the 1970s,” according to Tom Kloza of the
Oil Price Information Service. “There is no question: gasoline should be
cheaper.”

It is for no other reason than political posturing that we are still
dealing with the ethanol issue. It has been well documented that ethanol
production is actually a boondoggle causing more harm to the
environment than good. It uses billions of gallons of water that would
otherwise be left alone. It is responsible for soil erosion due to the
increased production of corn, not to mention the pollution of water
tables by the added use of fertilizers.

Furthermore, there has been no substantive proof that ethanol is leading
to lower CO2 emissions or that it is linked to the slightly lower
overall CO2 levels in the atmosphere over the past several years. The
supposed need for ethanol is further negated by the fact that global
surface temperatures have been stagnant for 18 years without any rise.
This comes as bad news to the group now gathered in Paris to hamstrung
American manufacturing in the name of the planet.

While Republicans frequently battle with the EPA and the ecofascists
over their plans to remake the economy for their own purposes, few
politicians left or right are willing to go against the farm lobby,
which stands to lose big if ethanol standards are repealed.

Ted Cruz is the only GOP presidential candidate who had the backbone to
tell Iowans that he was against renewable-fuel standards. None of the
other candidates, even the bombastic Donald Trump, have delivered a
full-throated refusal to the continued adherence to the ethanol mandate.
Until more politicians open their eyes to the truth about ethanol,
we’ll continue to be stuck with this loser.

This reminds me of medieval controversies about how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. I know the answer but I'm not telling

Australia: Environment Minister Greg Hunt says Australia will back a
call from small island nations for a Paris climate change agreement to
include an aspirational goal of capping global temperature rises at 1.5
degrees celsius which is lower than the United Nations current target of
2C.

Pacific states and other nations vulnerable to rising sea levels are
calling for a tougher cap on global warming at the UN Paris talks taking
place over the next fortnight. Their concerns are heightened by the
series of national carbon reduction pledges made in the lead up to the
UN conference which will not be enough to meet the agreed goal of
keeping warming to within 2C of pre-industrial levels - estimates
suggest the current commitments add up to about 2.7 degrees of warming.

The government's attitude towards its smaller regional neighbours came
into question this week after an attempt by Foreign Minister Julie
Bishop to ridicule Labor's Tanya Plibersbek backfired. Ms Bishop accused
her rival of wrongly claiming the island of Eneko had "disappeared" but
instead got the name of the island wrong herself.

However, the Alliance of Small Island States, whose members include Fiji
and Jamaica, has used Australia as broker in its discussions with
bigger nations about including the 1.5C aspiration in the wording of any
agreement. The 1.5C goal cannot be included as a firm target because it
would be vetoed by larger developing nations who argue it would put too
much pressure on the their growing economies which require fossil fuels
to overcome issues such as access to electricity.

"The small island states would obviously like to see a clear goal for
1.5 degrees," Mr Hunt said. "Some of the largest developing countries
are more resistant to that. Australia is happy to have a reference to
1.5 degrees with obviously the clear over-arching goal fo the agreement
being below 2C. We are acting as a broker in that space. Our approach is
to be flexible and construtive."

Mr Hunt said one of the main challenges for the more than 190 countries
represented at the Paris summit will be agreeing on "genuine"
five-yearly reviews of national carbon reduction targets. Developed
countries such as the US, Australia and France - as well as some
fast-growing economies such as China - believe reviews are critical to
ensuring nations meet and then progressively improve their carbon
reduction targets for 2030.

"I think that the central element to a solution here will be the review
mechanisms," Mr Hunt said. "We have said that genuine five-year
reviews beginning with a review that takes real effect in 2020, 2025,
2030 is the right way to do it."

France has set a Saturday deadline for the various negotiating groups to
come up with a draft document that eventually could form the basis of a
formal agreement. The text of this preliminary document will be at the
heart of further negotiations between countries - Australia will be
represented by Ms Bishop - during the second week of the conference.

Mr Hunt caused a minor commotion when he appeared to suggest the host
nation had already produced a "French text". Smaller nations are
sensitive to suggestions that France and other richer countries have
pre-judged the process. However, Mr Hunt's office later clarified his
reference was meant to refer to the text that would be produced as a
result of the negotiating groups.

Mr Hunt said he remained confident that India - which is resisting
strict five year reviews - would not be an obstacle to a binding
agreement.

"I remain confident it will be hard fought two weeks but at the end of
the day we are likely to achieve - and will achieve - an agreement," he
said.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

3 December, 2015

Is there no limit to the utter nonsense poured out in the name of
global warming?? And it's not just some Al Gore type. It's
coming from NASA's chief scientist

Isn't the blonde Ellen Stofan gorgeous? Maybe she is just NASA's token female

I
quote Ms Stofan: "Photosynthesis declines rapidly at temperatures
above about 95 degrees Fahrenheit". Has the good woman never
heard of the tropics? I was born in the tropics and temperatures
there are very commonly above 95F, quite a bit above sometimes. So
were the plants around me all dying? Not on your Nelly!
You've never seen such vigorous growth. They'll almost leap out and grab
you and yours if you let them. So they were all photosynthesizing like
mad, in other words. I think the woman must be mad.

Climate change due to human activity is causing visible shifts on our
planet, and NASA is uniquely positioned to observe these effects.
“If we continue on our current course, it’s going to be hard to feed
this planet because it’s so hot,” Ellen Stofan, NASA’s chief scientist,
told Business Insider.

In fact, photosynthesis — the process all plants use to convert carbon
dioxide into carbohydrates — declines rapidly at temperatures above
about 95 degrees Fahrenheit, Stofan explained during a talk October 16
at The James Beard Foundation Food Conference, a meeting to discuss the
future of food.

And the evidence suggests that we could reach too-high temperatures too soon.

Stofan has spent most of her career studying Venus, a planet with a
major greenhouse effect — a fancy term for a planet’s atmosphere
trapping the sun’s heat and warming its surface.

Here on Earth, NASA satellites are seeing a similar trend, and it’s
veering toward dangerous levels. This warming trend is bad news for our
ability to grow food.

This wouldn’t be the first time human-caused climate change has affected
our ability to grow food, Stofan pointed out. The Dust Bowl of the
1930s, which had a devastating effect on agriculture in the US and
Canada, can be traced to poor farming practices and severe drought
brought on by climate change. [Whoa! I thought anthropogenic
global warming started in the second half of C20, not the first
half! She doesn't even have her Warmist gospel straight]

“It is delusional for President Obama and Hillary Clinton and anyone
else to say that climate change is our near-term most severe security
threat. It is ISIS, period, followed closely by Iran and perhaps
Russia,” said Fiorina.

President Barack Obama has said on multiple occasions – including in his
State of the Union address in January - that climate change is the
greatest threat. In May, he even linked Islamic terrorism to climate
change. In 2014, Secretary of State John Kerry calledclimate change “the
biggest challenge of all that we face right now.”

“Your reaction to the summit and to the contention by some in the Obama
administration that climate change is, if not the biggest, certainly the
most immediate threat to our national security?” host Chris Wallace
asked Fiorina.

“Well, that's delusional. It is delusional for President Obama and
Hillary Clinton and anyone else to say that climate change is our
near-term most severe security threat. It is ISIS, period, followed
closely by Iran and perhaps Russia,” said Fiorina.

Obama is taking part in the latest UN climate change summit in Paris,
also known as the COP21 event. In a speech last week, he linked the
summit to the war on terror, saying, “What a powerful rebuke to the
terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and shows that we
will not be deterred from building a better future for our
children.”

“The terrorists don't care that we're gathering in Paris other than it
provides a target, just as he said, well, Republicans are giving
terrorists a recruiting tool when we don't think Syrian refugees should
be allowed to enter this country if we cannot properly vet them,”
Fiorina said.

“President Obama is delusional about this. He’s delusional about the
threat, which apparently is why he won't do anything about it,” she
said.

“Do you think it's worthwhile for him to go to Paris, to go to this
international summit and try to work out emissions limits?” Wallace
asked.

“Well, look, if you read the fine print of the science, what the
scientists tell us, all those scientists who say climate change is real
and manmade, they also tell us that a single nation acting alone can
make no difference at all. that it would take a concerted global effort
over 30 years, costing trillions of dollars. I think the likelihood of
that is near zero,” Fiorina said.

“So, no, I don’t think it’s particularly productive,” she said. “I think
it would be far more productive if President Obama instead was there
leading an international coalition to stop human trafficking or an
international coalition for humanitarian relief for the refugees or an
international coalition to defeat ISIS. All those would be more useful
than time in Paris spent talking about climate change.”

In Paris, 147 heads of government will give speeches on what they agree is the world’s most pressing problem: climate change

So, the problem they are discussing - not warming, but dangerous warming
- has not yet manifested itself. It lies in the future. The climate has
changed, for sure, as it always does, but not yet in a way that is
harmful or unprecedented. As far as we can tell from satellites, global
average temperatures are less than half a degree warmer than they were
in 1979, when satellite data became available, though surface
thermometers suggest a bit more warming.

This year looks likely to be a lot warmer than last, though still not as
warm in both standard satellite data sets as 1998, the last time that a
strong El Niño in the Pacific Ocean boosted the global air temperature a
lot (surface thermometers say it will be warmer than 1998, once
adjusted in various ways). The average trend over the past 35 years is
0.1 degrees of warming per decade according to the satellite data, less
than 0.2 per decade according to the surface thermometers. Neither trend
is fast enough to produce significantly dangerous climate change even
by the latter part of this century.

The warming has been much slower than was predicted when the scare
began. Nor is it evenly spread. The Antarctic continent has warmed
hardly at all, and the entire southern hemisphere has warmed about half
as fast as the northern. The Arctic has warmed more than the tropics,
night has warmed more than day and winter has warmed more than summer.
Cities have warmed faster than the countryside, but that’s because of
local warming factors, not global ones: buildings, vehicles, industry,
pavements and people trap warmth.

How unusual is today’s temperature? As I did this weekend, you have no
doubt had conversations along the following lines recently: “Hasn’t it
been mild? End of November and we’ve hardly had a frost yet!” All true.
But then be honest: can you not recall such conversations throughout
your life? I can. And here’s what the Met Office, the UK’s national
weather service, had to say about November 1938, long before I was born:
“The weather of the month was distinguished by exceptional mildness: at
numerous places it was the mildest November on record.” In 1953
November was even milder and there was no air frost recorded in Oxford
in the last four months of the year at all.

I am not saying it has not generally become warmer, but that the
variation dwarfs the trend. Let’s go back a little further, to the
Middle Ages. It used to be argued by some that the “medieval warm
period” of about a thousand years ago, when mountain glaciers retreated,
vines grew further north and Iceland was widely cultivated, was
confined to Europe. We now know from multiple sources of evidence that
it was global. Tree lines were higher than today in many mountain
ranges, for example. Both North Pacific and Antarctic Ocean water
temperatures were 0.65C warmer than today.

Go back yet further, still within the current interglacial period, to
the so-called Holocene Optimum of 6,000-9,000 years ago. Ocean
temperatures were up to two degrees warmer than today, the Arctic Ocean
was nearly or completely ice-free at the end of summer in many years,
and the boreal forest in Siberia extended 150 miles further north than
today. July temperatures were up to six degrees warmer than today in the
Siberian Arctic.

Was this Holocene Optimum a horrible time of droughts, storms, disease
and famine? Not especially. It was the period in which agriculture
spread rapidly across the globe from five or seven centres of invention.
Abundant rainfall in Africa led to lakes in the Sahara with crocodiles
and hippos in them, surrounded by green vegetation in the monsoon
season.

Today’s gentle warming, progressing much more slowly than expected, is
also accompanied by generally improving conditions. Globally, droughts
are declining very slightly. Storms are not increasing in frequency or
intensity: this year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons.
Floods are worse in some places but usually because of land-use changes,
not more rainfall. Death rates from floods, storms and droughts have
plummeted and are now far lower than they were a century ago. Today,
arid areas such as western Australia or the Sahel region of Africa are
getting generally greener, thanks to the effect of more carbon dioxide
in the air, which makes plants grow faster and resist drought better.

Besides, we have to make allowance for a human tendency to read far too
much into short-term weather changes - and to assume that all change is
bad. Consider this newspaper cutting: “The Arctic ocean is warming up,
icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding
the water too hot. [There are] hitherto unheard-of temperatures in the
Arctic zone.” It’s not from recent decades at all, but from 1922. Or
this one: “The ice of the Arctic Ocean is melting so rapidly that more
than one third of it has disappeared in fifty years”. From 1940.

In fact, the Arctic, and the world as a whole then cooled between 1950
and 1970, which then led to these headlines, all from 1970: “Scientists
See Ice Age in the Future” (The Washington Post), “Is Mankind
Manufacturing a New Ice Age for Itself?” (Los Angeles Times), “Scientist
predicts a new ice age by 21st century” (The Boston Globe), “US and
Soviet Press Studies of a Colder Arctic” (The New York Times) and (my
favourite) “Dirt Will Bring New Ice Age” (The Sydney Morning Herald).

The 40,000 people meeting in Paris over the next 12 days are committed
to the view that the weather is certain to do something nasty towards
the end of this century unless we cut emissions. In this, they are out
of line with scientists. A survey of the members of the American
Meteorological Society in 2012 found that only 52 per cent agree that
climate change is mostly man-made, and as to its being very harmful if
unchecked, only 34 per cent of AMS members agree. The rest said they
think it will be either not harmful or not very harmful.

Britons warned to watch out for RATS invading their homes this winter
as odds are slashed on it being the coldest winter in a century

But actual weather doesn't matter, of course. According to NOAA, the
November just past will be the warmest ever. See if I am right. When you
have Warmists in charge of the temperature record, it's like employing a
fox to guard the hen house

Britons have been warned to watch out for rats invading their homes
after the odds were slashed on it being the coldest winter in a century.

Pest controllers say rodents are responsible for causing millions of
pounds of damage to properties across the UK by gnawing their way
indoors to escape freezing weather.

The warning comes after temperatures plummeted as low as -6C over parts
of Britain last week - sparking fears the country will experience its
coldest winter in decades.
Britons have been warned to watch out for rats invading their homes
after the odds were slashed on it being the coldest winter in a century

Britons have been warned to watch out for rats invading their homes
after the odds were slashed on it being the coldest winter in a century

Pest control firms normally see a 40 per cent rise in call-outs for
rodent infestations at this time of year and have offered advice on how
to stop rats from finding their way indoors.

A spokesman for Cleankill Environmental Services said today: 'With
forecasters predicting the harshest winter the UK has seen in half a
century, pest controllers are now advising people to make sure their
homes are fully protected against invading rodents.

'At a time when we feel like bolting our doors and keeping winter cold
outside, it is hardly surprising that mice, rats and squirrels are
trying to join us in our sanctuaries of warmth.

'They will not only scratch, gnaw and rip items apart to make nesting
materials but they will also chew beams and joists, causing structural
damage, and through electrical cables, which can cause fires.'

Tips for avoiding an infestation this winter include clearing out stair
cupboards, checking pipework for holes and checking in the loft for
signs of rats.

The firm also suggests checking brickwork to make sure air bricks, which
allow ventilation, are intact as larger Victorian ones have gaps large
enough for rodents to sneak through.

Other tips include cleaning under kitchen units and keeping a tidy garden and putting brush strips on doors.

Mother- of-two Rosie Spears, of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, said she had been
'invaded' by rats for the past three years before getting a pest
controller in to kill them off.

The 43-year-old said: 'The whole experience was horrid. They kept me
awake at night with their scuttling around and gnawing, but whenever we
set traps they just ignored them.

'We put up with it for three years and then got someone in and they were
gone within a month, so hopefully this year they won't come back as
we've plugged all the gaps we can see.'

Ladbrokes has cut their odds from 4/1 to 7/2 on Britain experiencing its
coldest winter in more than 100 years after sleet, snow and ice
continued to sweep across the country.

There have been reports temperatures could drop around the end of
December and fears that more than 40,000 sick and elderly could die as a
result of the cold.

Expedition To Study Global Warming Put On Hold Because Of TOO MUCH ICE

An expedition to study the effects of global warming was put on hold Wednesday. The reason? Too much ice.

The CCGS Amundsen, a Medium Arctic icebreaker and Arctic research vessel
operated by the Canadian Coast Guard, was to travel throughout Hudson
Bay, a body of water in northeastern Canada, but was rerouted to help
ships who were stuck in the icy water.

A Coast Guard officer said the conditions were the “worst he’s seen in 20 years,” reports CBC news.

“Obviously it has a large impact on us,” says Martin Fortier, executive
director of ArcticNet, which coordinates research on the vessel. “It’s a
frustrating situation.”

ArcticNet is a network of scientists who study “the impacts of climate change and modernization in the coastal Canadian Arctic.”

The vessel is one of only two icebreakers in the Arctic, leaving the
ship obligated to reroute their travel plans to help break ice for
resupply ships.

Johnny Leclair, an assistant commissioner for the Coast Guard, said
there should be two more icebreakers headed to the Arctic in the next
week, which would free up their ship to continue on their originally
planned trip.

Fortier is hopeful the season will still be productive.

“The people planning the large expeditions have a plan B,” Fortier said.
“We have already curtailed or either moved to a later date some of the
stations and some of the areas we were suppose to sample.”

The ship even has a blog post that it has been updating. Here is an excerpt:

“Meanwhile, we’ve run into ice and out of darkness. During our night of
action, the sun didn’t set, so only the face of my watch was there to
tell me that it was 3 AM as we were tying down incubators. At five
thirty in the morning, as the sun rose — or, rather, got a bit brighter
in the sky — filling the world with a deep pink, and the waves turned
glassy and viscous and bright, our fingers finally fell numb and our
setup was finally done, just in time for a quick nap before breakfast.
Tonight, likely, well see the stuck ships.”

In opening remarks Monday at the climate change conference in Paris,
France, President Barack Obama again tied the terrorist attacks in Paris
to climate change, saying the conference is a “rejection of those who
would tear down our world.”

“We stand united in solidarity to deliver justice to the terrorist
network responsible for those attacks but to protect our people and
uphold the enduring values that keep us strong and keep us free, and we
salute the people of Paris for insisting this crucial conference go on –
an act of defiance that proves nothing will deter us from building the
future we want for our children,” Obama said.

“What greater rejection of those who would tear down our world than marshaling our best efforts to serve it?” he added.

Obama said the world leaders have “come to Paris to show our resolve,”
and he offered “condolences to the people of France for the barbaric
attacks on this beautiful city.”

“One of the enemies we’ll be fighting at this conference is cynicism –
the notion we can’t do anything about climate change,” the president
said.

Obama echoed comments he made while visiting Alaska this summer, saying
he saw a “a glimpse of our children’s fate if climate keeps changing
faster than our efforts to address it.”

“This summer I saw the effects of climate change firsthand in our
northernmost state Alaska where the sea is already swallowing villages
and eroding shorelines, where permafrost thaws and the tundra burns,
where glaciers are melting at a pace unprecedented in modern times,” he
said at Monday's summit.

“It was a preview of one possible future – a glimpse of our children’s
fate if the climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address
it: submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields that no longer grow,
political disruptions that trigger new conflict, and even more floods of
desperate peoples seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own,”
Obama added.

“Earlier this month in Dubai, after years of delay, the world agreed to
work together to cut the super pollutants known as HFCs. That’s
progress. Already, prior to Paris, more than 180 countries representing
nearly 95 percent of global emissions have put forward their own climate
targets. That is progress,” the president said.

Obama said the U.S. is already on track to reach emissions targets he
set six years ago in Copenhagen to reduce carbon emissions 17 percent
below 2005 levels by the year 2020, so he set a new target last year to
reduce emissions 26 to 28 percent below 2005 in 10 years.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

2 December, 2015

NASA says Antarctic has been COOLING for past SIX years

This adds to the Zwally findings of a month ago to similar effect. Much to amuse here, though. The NASA report
is very cagey, as you would expect. For a start, they put a very boring
headline on it: "NASA’s Operation IceBridge Completes Twin Polar
Campaigns", then they flood their report with no doubt worthy technical
details and even hark back to a 2012 study in an endeavour to blunt the
impact of their findings. So it seems that only the Daily Express
writer excerpted below read the report carefully enough to sift the
wheat from the chaff. All subsequent media reports of the matter go back
to the DE article.

ANTARCTIC temperatures have cooled over the past six years, according to US space agency NASA.

An intensive scientific study of both Earth's poles has found that from
2009 to 2016 overall temperature has dropped in the southern polar
region.

NASA’s Operation IceBridge is an airborne survey of polar ice and has
finalised two overlapping research campaigns at both the poles.

In the last few weeks NASA has revealed the overall amount of ice has
increased at the Antarctic and the amount of sea ice has also extended.

Coupled with the latest announcement of slight cooling in the area, it
has fuelled claims from climate change deniers that human
industrialisation is not having the huge impact on global temperature as
often is claimed.

Christopher Shuman, a University of Maryland, Baltimore County
glaciologist working at Goddard, said: "Field data suggests that there’s
been a modest cooling in the area over the 2009–2015 time period, and
images collected during that time by the Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer on the Terra and Aqua satellites show more persistent
fast ice (sea ice that is attached to the shore) in the Larsen A and
Larsen B embayments”

However, Mr Shuman warned that in some areas of the Antarctic, glaciers
continued to melt at significant levels, despite the slight
temperature drop.

During one flight in the Peninsula that mapped the drainage area of
several glaciers, a drop of more than 490 feet (150 meters) in the
height of two glaciers since IceBridge last plotted them, in 2009, was
measured.

Both glaciers, called Green and Hektoria, were tributaries to the Larsen B ice shelf, which disintegrated in 2002.

After the ice shelf collapsed, it stopped buttressing the glaciers that
fed it, and glacier elevations have fallen dramatically since then.

A study published in 2012 showed average elevation losses of up to 82
feet (25 meters) per year for the lower Green and Hektoria glaciers from
2006 to 2011.

A NASA spokesman said: "So IceBridge’s discovery that both are still
losing ice fast many years after the loss of the adjacent ice shelf is
“not all that surprising given what we have observed with other
sensors,” said Mr Shuman.

As noted below China this year to date has recently approved the
construction of 155 new coal powered plants. It is true that China leads
in many areas, e.g. solar hot water heating, but it has not yet begun
to reduce net emissions. China's urgent need is to reduce REAL
pollution, particulate pollution, and they will no doubt get somewhere
with that. And it is cleaning up coal-fired power station
emissions that is needed for that. But cleaning up particulate
pollution should also reduce CO2 emissions as a byproduct of that.
So they are getting some propaganda leverage out of that. The
Warmists desperately want to believe that China is on their side but
China is only on China's side

Back in 2009, China was a reluctant partner during major climate
negotiations in Copenhagen that eventually collapsed amid recriminations
between rich and poor nations. This time around the world’s biggest
polluter is regarded as a driving force behind what could be a
comprehensive deal at a world climate summit in Paris.

The change in stance has a lot to do with the record levels of foul air
that often hang over China’s major industrialized urban centers,
undermining public health. The resulting backlash over the smog has made
President Xi Jinping’s government far more serious about combating
climate change and investing in cleaner forms of energy.

China’s resolve will be tested along with other countries as world
leaders, including U.S. President Barack Obama and China’s Xi, gather in
the French capital on Monday. The talks organized by the United Nations
are scheduled to run for two weeks and include the biggest ever
gathering of leaders on a single day.

“Nowhere has our coordination been more necessary or more fruitful” than
on climate, Obama told reporters as he met Xi Monday morning in Paris.
“As the two largest economies in the world and the two largest carbon
emitters, we have both determined it is our responsibility to take
action.”

The road to Paris for China and others has been in the works for some
time. In March 2014, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang declared war on
pollution, telling the National People’s Congress that his government
would accelerate efforts to tackle environmental problems.

At the same time, China has embarked on a makeover designed to shift its
$10 trillion-plus economy away from reliance on big, energy-consuming
heavy industries and toward services and consumer spending. For climate
deal warriors, both moves have added up to a big and welcome policy
shift.

“The fact that you’ve got some countries like China and Russia actively
talking about their role is a complete change, so we’ve made tremendous
progress,” U.K. Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd said in
an Oct. 15 interview in London.

The nascent alliance between the world’s two biggest polluters stands in
stark contrast to Copenhagen in 2009 where China’s premier at the time,
Wen Jiabao, missed a scheduled meeting with Barack Obama, and the U.S.
president later forced himself into a meeting of the Chinese with
Brazil, South Africa and India in order to get face time with the
leaders he felt necessary to forge a lasting deal.

China’s Xi, building on the November 2014 accord with Obama, promised in
September that China will start a national pollution-trading system to
cut global-warming emissions in 2017. China will also partner with the
U.S. on other ways to cut emissions, has pledged $3.1 billion to help
developing countries combat climate change and also promised to cut
carbon dioxide emitted per dollar of economic output by 60 percent to 65
percent from 2005 levels.

“The fact that the United States and China at the presidential level
joined arms and stepped forward in November of last year in the ramp up
to 2015 and put forward strong targets together, these two historic
antagonists at the presidential level, was a big shot in the arm to the
negotiations,” Todd Stern, U.S. special envoy on climate change, told
reporters Oct. 23 during a conference call.

China’s pollution scourge is a public health crisis. Air pollution is
killing 4,000 people a day in the country, according to a recent study
by Berkeley Earth, an independent research group funded largely by
educational grants. The researchers cited coal burning used to produce
electricity and heat homes and offices as the likely principal cause.

Much of the drive to do something about emissions in China is borne by the need for action on pollution.

China was the biggest renewables market in the world with 433 gigawatts
of generating capacity at the end of 2014, more than double the second
place U.S., according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance data.

The Asian nation added more than four times as much clean energy
capacity as the U.S. in 2014. Moreover, solar installations have gone
from about 300 megawatts in 2009 at the time of Copenhagen to almost 33
gigawatts at the end of 2014 -- a 110-fold increase. China accounts for
almost one of every three wind turbines in the world at the moment.

“Peak demand for coal will happen at some point for China in the future
and if anything this year has brought a number of surprises and
indicators, whether it’s economic growth or electricity demand
consumption,” said Justin Wu, an analyst with Bloomberg New Energy
Finance in Hong Kong. “Everything is pointing to the (coal) peaking
happening earlier or sooner than even previous estimates.”

China remains a voracious consumer of coal regardless of the boom in
clean energy. The most polluting fossil fuel still accounts for more
than 60 percent of the nation’s total power installations. Some 155
coal-fired power plants, or four per week, have received environmental
permits in the first nine months of this year, according to Greenpeace
East Asia.

As long as coal is seen as the cheapest form of energy, the fossil fuel
may still remain an attractive option for regional governments eager to
promote economic development.

The rather childish presentation below was apparently written by
Mohamed Alhwaity and appeared in "The Conversation", a webzine that
claims to offer "Academic rigour, journalistic flair". If only it
did! What I have excerpted below is the core of an article titled:
"How scientists know climate change is happening". I have added a
few basic notes below to show that they DON'T know that

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) presents six main lines of evidence for climate change.

* We have tracked the unprecedented recent increase in the amount of
atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases since the
beginning of the industrial revolution. Big deal. That only matters if we know the sensitivity of climate to CO2. It looks like zero or not much more

* We know from laboratory and atmospheric measurements that such
greenhouse gases do indeed absorb heat when they are present in the
atmosphere. Aren't they supposed to REFLECT heat? Mohamed hasn't even got his Warmism straight.

* We have tracked significant increase in global temperatures of at
least 0.85°C and a sea level rise of 20cm over the past century. And why is such a trivial temperature rise a problem?

* We have analysed the effects of natural events such as sunspots and
volcanic eruptions on the climate, and though these are essential to
understand the pattern of temperature changes over the past 150 years,
they cannot explain the overall warming trend. Svensmark has shown a strong solar effect. Now confirmed by experiments at CERN

* We have observed significant changes in the Earth’s climate system
including reduced snowfall in the Northern Hemisphere, retreat of sea
ice in the Arctic, retreating glaciers on all continents, and shrinking
of the area covered by permafrost and the increasing depth of its active
layer. All of which are consistent with a warming global climate. But the Antarctic is what matters and it has been COOLING

* We continually track global weather and have seen significant shifts
in weather patterns and an increase in extreme events all around the
world. Patterns of precipitation (rainfall and snowfall) have changed,
with parts of North and South America, Europe and northern and central
Asia becoming wetter, while the Sahel region of central Africa, southern
Africa, the Mediterranean and southern Asia have become drier. Intense
rainfall has become more frequent, along with major flooding. We’re also
seeing more heat waves. The statistics indicate FEWER extreme weather events

According to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA) between 1880 and the beginning of 2014, the 19 warmest years on
record have all occurred within the past 20 years; and 2015 is set to be
the warmest year ever recorded. And those "warm" years have differed
from one-another by only hundredths of a degree, which is not
statistically significant. The figures in fact show a plateau, not
a rise

Twenty years in the making, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s “new”
nuclear reactor will soon go online. It will also be technologically
behind the times: it’s only a Generation II reactor, rather than the
Generation III type used in Canada, France, and Japan.

Climate policymakers gathering in Paris this week should lament the
regulatory chicanery responsible for the delays. After all, “nuclear
power is a carbon-footprint-free technology,” writes Independent
Institute Research Director William F. Shughart II. In a recent op-ed
for Investor’s Business Daily, Shughart explains that excessive
government regulation has been a great hindrance to nuclear power in the
United States—much to the detriment of humanity and to the cause of a
cleaner environment.

“U.S. politicians who are legitimately concerned about the impact of
fossil fuel combustion on the world's climate should be among the
strongest advocates of nuclear energy,” Shughart writes. “It is clean,
safe and reliable (much more reliable than solar and wind power).”

The Obama administration says very little about nuclear power in its
recent “Clean Energy Plan.” So perhaps we should just be thankful that
it did not further delay the Watts Bar Unit 2 reactor. “The NRC’s
decision to license the operation of another nuclear reactor in the
Tennessee Valley deserves one-and-a-half cheers,” Shughart continues.
“Were it not for the time and money the government unnecessarily
squandered on the project they might get three cheers.”

Deep divisions resurfaced ahead of last night’s opening of the Paris
climate talks, with the US and Australia digging in to insist that
developed nations’ historical responsibilities for carbon dioxide
emissions be scrapped.

The issue has been a “red line” for developing nations led by India,
which is pushing ahead with economic development to bring millions of
people out of poverty.

A change to how historical carbon emissions are treated would require
India and other nations to contribute more to future emissions cuts and
climate finance.

A confidential “non-paper” discussion document issued by the US sets out
the hard line that the US and Australia intend to take in the Paris
talks.

Together with more than 100 world leaders, Malcolm Turnbull was due to
address the Paris conference to outline Australia’s position early
today.

Australia has pledged to cut carbon dioxide emissions by ­between 26 and 28 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030.

The Prime Minister has said tougher cuts may be possible in future and
has supported a UN process under which country pledges are reviewed
every five years and progressively tougher measures agreed.

Federal Environment Minister Greg Hunt has said he believes a deal is
possible in Paris. “It won’t be a perfect outcome but I think it will be
a critical outcome and it will be a success,” Mr Hunt said.

Big differences remain over whether a Paris agreement should be legally
binding and how it will deal with the issues of historical
­responsibility for carbon dioxide emissions and who should fund and
administer a $100 billion-a-year fund.

Underlining one of the major challenges to reaching a universal deal,
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi warned last night that poor nations
had a right to burn carbon to grow their economies.

Chinese intransigence on the issue of historical responsibility was
largely blamed for the breakdown of the 2009 UN climate change talks in
Copenhagen.

The US discussion paper brought the most contentious ­issues to the surface on day one.

At the previous round of ­climate talks in Bonn, Germany, last month,
negotiators representing 80 per cent of the world’s population walked
out when references to historical responsibilities were left out of the
negotiating text.

They were subsequently ­reinstated, more than doubling the size of the text that has now made its way to Paris.

Leaking of the confidential US discussion paper has caused a ­furore in
India, which has made keeping the issue of historical ­responsibility on
global carbon ­dioxide emissions a condition of its agreement at the
Paris talks.

US President Barack Obama and Mr Modi were due to share the stage at the
opening ceremony of the Paris conference to announce new measures on
­research and development.

Behind the scenes, negotiators face significant hurdles in finalising a
Paris text. A report in India’s Business Standard said that in the US
discussion paper, the US said it wanted each country’s greenhouse gas
reduction pled­ges determined independently by each nation rather than
through a process of international negotiation.

The report said any move to remove the wall of differentiation between
developed and developing countries would end any ­notion of historical
responsibility.

The US position paper also wants developing countries to contribute to
the climate funds in future and not just the developed countries as is
required under ­existing UN arrangements.

Mr Modi issued his challenge as the 12-day conference opened.
“Justice demands that, with what little carbon we can still safely burn,
developing countries are allowed to grow,” he wrote in the Financial
Times. “The lifestyles of a few must not crowd out opportunities for the
many still on the first steps of the development ladder.”

A spokesman for the ­Department of Foreign Affairs said Australia was aware of the US discussion paper.

“Like the US, we want a common platform for all countries to take action
from 2020, moving past binary differentiation between developed and
developing countries, and allowing for continuous improvement over
time.”

In India, the US and Australian position is considered against the
spirit of the UN negotiations. The existing UN convention distributes
the burden of emissions reduction and other actions based on the
principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities, respective
capabilities and national circumstances”.

Maintaining this position was fundamental to India agreeing to the Paris
round talks. India claims it is not responsible for historical
emissions and therefore should not be penalised in efforts to develop
and alleviate poverty.

The US and Australia now wants the Paris agreement to focus only on
existing economic capabilities of countries and their existing
circumstances.

The UN’s much-anticipated COP21 — a 12-day climate summit that promises
to reduce chronic health issues, quash terrorist groups, usher in social
justice and all-around save the planet — gets underway today in Paris.
Did we mention it’s the key to stopping the raucous bloodshed from
groups like the Islamic State? “I will be joining President Hollande and
other world leaders in Paris for the Global Climate Conference,” Barack
Obama proclaimed last week from the White House before burning through
an ungodly amount of fossil fuels on his way to France. “What a powerful
rebuke to the terrorists it will be when the world stands as one and
shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our
children.”

Actually, they couldn’t care less, because it’s blood and dominion
they’re after, not a stable climate that’s never existed. It’s
incredible the things Democrats purport will be solved by the summit.
They’d say the snowstorm blanketing the Midwest this week is actually
CO2 falling from the sky if it makes reaching an agreement more
attainable.

But we digress. What, exactly, will the conference accomplish, assuming a
deal is even reached? Even regulatory advocates aren’t entirely sure.
The Wall Street Journal reports, “The single most important benchmark
underpinning this week’s talks in Paris on climate change — two degrees
Celsius — has guided climate-treaty discussions for decades, but
scientists are at odds on the relevance of that target. …

Policy makers tend to assume the two-degree target expresses a solid
scientific view, but it doesn’t.” In fact, the IPCC’s own studies say
nothing about this supposed benchmark. And here we thought the science
was settled! “Still,” adds the Journal, “many scientists back the goal
because they see it as giving policy makers a clear-cut target to shoot
at in the fight against global warming.” Translation: Never let a good
crisis go to waste.

Delegates have a lot going for them — perhaps not-so-coincidentally.
Last year was (wrongly) declared the warmest on record, and a powerful
El Niño virtually guarantees this year will be even hotter (based on
NOAA’s methodology; again, satellite data suggests otherwise). You could
easily argue that things line up a little too well.

As we reported earlier this year, the government is fudging global
temperature data to fit the narrative, which London Telegraph writer
Christopher Booker rightly says “is the biggest science scandal ever.”
And as Investor’s Business Daily editorializes, “No one knows, nor will
ever know, if man-made climate change even exists outside of imaginative
thinking and flawed computer models. So no one can ever know if it’s
defeated or not.” What a powerful message it would send to jihadis if
world leaders would use all that energy in Paris to annihilate the real
enemy — radical Islamic terrorism.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

1 December, 2015

Experts call for reduced meat consumption to prevent climate change

They are pissing into the wind on this one. As China and India become richer, meat consumption will RISE

That’s the warning from the authors of Changing Climate, Changing Diets
who argue cutting down the amount of meat consumed could significantly
contribute to a reduction in greenhouse gasses that contribute to global
warming.

Authors Laura Wellesley, Catherine Happer and Antony Froggatt say while
leaders from 195 nations will meet in Paris next week to discuss ways of
keeping climate change within the critical two degrees, they are mising
a trick by failing to address the issue of meat consumption. They’re
calling for governments to consider a range of policy measures from a
tax on meat and other unsustainable products to clearer labelling and
public awareness campaigns.

“Globally we should eat less meat. Global per capita meat consumption is
already above healthy levels; critically so in developed countries. We
cannot avoid dangerous climate change unless consumption trends change,”
they write.

The reports states livestock farming and meat production is regarded as a
driver of deforestation and habitat destruction around the world and
accounts for 15 per cent of global greenhouse gas emmissions - around
the same amount as “tailpipe emissions from all the world’s vehicles.”

“Even with best efforts to reduce the emissions footprint of livestock
production, the sector will consume a growing share of the remaining
carbon budget,” it says, as a “protein transition” takes place around
the world with growing demand for meat from burgeoning middle classes in
India and China.

“Governments need credible strategies to close the gap, and reducing
meat consumption is an obvious one: worldwide adoption of a healthy diet
would generate over a quarter of the emission reductions needed by
2050.”

The 14-month project done in conjunction with Glasgow University used
focus groups in Brazil, China, UK and US and found people eat double the
recommended amount of meat in industrialised countries leading to
pressure on resources and health concerns such as obesity and cancer.

Despite what they describe as a “compelling case” for action, the
research found governments are loath to intervene because they fear a
backlash and are “trapped in a cycle of inertia”.

“They fear the repercussions of intervention, while low public awareness
means they feel no pressure to intervene,” the report states.

“Soft interventions to raise awareness among consumers or ‘nudge’ them
towards more sustainable choices, for example by increasing the
availability and prominence of alternative options at the point of sale,
are likely to be well received.”

It comes a month after the World Health Organisation warned red and
processed meat were carcinogenic for humans. Eating just 50 grams a day
of processed meat like bacon, sausages and biltong, was enough to
increase the risk of cancer. Meanwhile red meat was classified as
“probably carcinogenic” based on limited evidence it caused colorectal
cancer.

The UK’s Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board’s Corporate
Affairs manager Andy Hutson said the “simplistic suggestion” that
cutting meat consumption will make a difference to the environment
“doesn’t hold water” and won’t improve efficiency when it comes to
livestock consumption.

“We do not believe a meat tax is realistic. Potentially, it could fuel a
social divide where poorer families could be priced out of the consumer
market, while opening that market to more imports from global
competitors,” he said, adding that consumption is already falling in the
UK as the price of protein becomes more expensive.

He said the industry has also produced three “roadmaps” covering
practical ways for producers to reduce their “environmental footprint.”

“We are also funding a range of research projects, including
investigation of dietary ingredients to reduce methane emissions from
the rumen of beef cattle, and a suite of projects aimed at improving the
health of animals – which will improve welfare and performance
alongside reducing the lifetime greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”

Underneath all of Sanders’ rhetoric to fight class inequality and Wall
Street corruption is an initiative that may directly contradict this
platform. Sanders, likely more than any other 2016 presidential
candidate, is spearheading the initiative for a carbon tax.

As the mover and shaker George Soros sponsored media outlet Mother Jones
article recently highlighted, Sanders is the leading climate change
candidate. Sanders was recently endorsed as the number one member of the
Senate by Climate Hawks Vote, a new super PAC. He recently did an
editorial for the Huffington Post reiterating his conviction.

“Global warming is real and it is caused by human activity,” he wrote.
“In terms of droughts, heat waves, floods, forest fires, disease, rising
sea levels and extreme weather disturbances, global warming is already
causing devastating problems. The simple truth is that if we do not act
boldly and quickly these problems will only get much worse in the years
to come.”

At the first Democrat debate for the 2016 election, Sanders called
global warming the biggest threat facing the U.S. He went on to call for
the carbon tax as the primary solution.

Back in Sanders’ home state, Vermont’s East Montpelier Rep. Tony Klein,
Democratic chairman of the House Committee on Energy stated in late 2014
that Vermont will likely be the first in the union to implement a
carbon tax.

Alongside the carbon tax is another climate change initiative, lesser
known but similar in aim. It is called the renewable energy portfolio
standard, states that adopt these must convert energy production into
non-carbon alternatives at an increasing percentage every few years. The
goal in Vermont is currently 15 percent and up to 90 percent by 2050.
Currently, 29 states have signed onto a REPs, but none since 2009. At
least two have backed out or put a freeze on it.

An example of renewable energy costs hitting the local rate payer can be
found in Hardwick, Vermont. The town’s electric department told the
Hardwick Gazette that clean burning coal (just water vapor and carbon
emitted) can be purchased for just about 4 cents per kWh. Solar panels
which are being purchased to fill REP requirements can cost around 12
cents per kWh, that’s not including subsidies.

In an interview with Dr. Bronner Cohen of the National Center for Public
Policy Research, he commented on the high costs of alternative energy.

“If you just look at solar nationwide, it just provides U.S. with two
tenths of 1 percent of our electricity, and this is after decades of
subsidies,” he said. “Wind is slightly above 3 percent. Put the two
together and it’s still fewer than 3.5 percent. So how would you propose
to get to 12 or 15 percent? It’s not going to happen.”

He added efforts to reach those goals would be prohibitively expensive
and hurt those who would be least capable to withstand the financial
burden, namely the middle and lower class.

The much touted scientific consensus that carbon is causing global
warming is apparently not a consensus for everyone. As a Forbes article
from January pointed out, there is no such poll indicating that “97
percent” of any group of scientists supports the theory of man-made
global warming.

Were it assumed the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
models are true, the U.S. acting alone would barely make a difference
according to journalist Ronald Bailey for a 2013 Reason.com story.

“Assuming the projected trajectory of overall global emissions by all
countries,” wrote Bailey. “If the U.S. were somehow to completely
eliminate all of its greenhouse gas emissions now that would reduce
future warming by only 0.2 degree Celsius by 2100.”

The very notion that carbon dioxide causes warming at all was disputed by Cohen.

“Carbon dioxide does not drive temperature,” he said. “If temperatures
rise for whatever reason, carbon dioxide will rise afterwards. It does
not drive temperature. It’s the other way around, it’s a lagging
indicator.”

A looming shadow in the backdrop is the 2009 scandal of leaked emails
from East Anglia University. The emails revealed manipulation of data
and deception by IPCC climatologists according many media outlets
including English columnist James Delingpole who dubbed it
“climategate.”

Sanders is not the only high profile leader ratcheting up calls for the carbon tax.

“Climate change is a global problem with grave implications,” said Pope
Francis on the issue. “Environmental, social, economic, political and
for the distribution of goods, it represents one of the principal
challenges facing humanity in our day.”

If there were ever a means to micromanage economic development, it would
be the carbon tax. Any energy, any fuel, building, producing,
transporting, breathing, having a kid … every conceivable human activity
can be associated with carbon.

“Whether that’s the goal or not, that (austerity) will most certainly be
the result,” said Cohen. “You are imposing additional costs on middle
and lower class people. You may have millionaires who are going to shrug
their shoulders, they can do it. But what about people further down the
food chain? They can’t do it, this is very regressive. It is going to
hurt those most who are at the very bottom of the income scale.”

This week, outside my local London Tube station, Farringdon, people
dashing home from work have been greeted by leafleters urging them to
take part in the People’s March for Climate. ‘To change everything, we
need everyone’, the leaflet declares. But what exact kind of change do
they have in mind?
The People’s March for Climate leaflet

A quick look at the back of the leaflet reveals the thinking behind the
march. First off, who are The People? Are they the people paying more
for their energy thanks to eco-taxes and subsidies? Are they the people
heading for Heathrow today, hoping to jet off to some other part of the
world, whose journey was delayed by disapproving activists who will do
everything they can to make sure the airport can never expand to meet
rising demand? It’s doubtful if they are the people around the world
desperately trying to work their way out of poverty, relying on the very
fossil fuels the marchers disapprove of to power that economic
development? Declaring this to be a march by and for The People is
pretty much the exact opposite of the truth.

The leaflet then tells us: ‘In days, world leaders are meeting for a
global climate summit [in Paris] that is our generation’s best chance to
end fossil fuels, and move to a game-changing 100 per cent clean-energy
track.’ At the moment, ‘clean’ energy makes up a small fraction of the
world’s energy use. Even if the world pursues the aim of lowering
greenhouse-gas emissions, low-carbon energy – including nuclear and
burning biomass as well as wind, solar, etc – will still only supply a
quarter of our energy needs by 2040. The rest of our energy will come
from fossil fuels – which are cheaper and much more reliable. Nothing
that happens at the climate talks in Paris will change that very much,
thankfully.

The leaflet goes on to talk about how the ‘the people of Paris’ have
been ‘silenced’, kept from ‘taking to the streets to meet world leaders
as they land for the meeting’ because of (fairly understandable)
security concerns. But the funny thing about this protest is just how
many campaigners will be inside the conference. According to the
conference website: ‘The conference is expected to attract close to
50,000 participants including 25,000 official delegates from government,
intergovernmental organisations, UN agencies, NGOs and civil society.’
This march is not a demand for action emanating from outsiders against
the wishes of world leaders. It’s a stage army designed to reinforce the
entire purpose of the event, to dress it up as the will of The People.

The climate talks in Paris are, in reality, driven by a coterie of
unelected officials, multinational NGOs and politicians desperate to
convey some moral leadership on the world stage. The aim is to control
The People, to use the environment as an excuse to restrict their
ability to live their lives as they choose and realise their ambitions.
There’s nothing democratic about that.

There are only ten GHCN stations currently operating in South Africa,
and only one of these, Calvinia, is classified by GISS as rural. It has a
population of 9000, and is situated inland in the Northern Cape
province.

This is the actual temperature trend at Calvinia, based on GHCN V2 raw data in 2011.

There has been no warming since the start of the record. Yet the current
version of GISS, which is based on adjusted GHCN data, has miraculously
morphed into a sharply rising trend.

Temperatures prior to 1989 have been marked down by around 0.7C, and those 1940’s ones by even more.

So, what about the other nine sites? We have three with long, and pretty much continuous, records back to the 19thC.

There was a large drop in temperatures at Port Elizabeth between 1950
and 1951, but there also large drops at that time at Capetown, Kimberley
and other sites, including East London, which is nearby. There is no
evidence that the change was due to anything but natural factors.

All the graphs have one thing in common – that tell tale peaking of
temperatures around 1940, which we see so often. There is even a glimpse
of this at Calvinia, where the warmest year on record was 1945.

All of these stations will, of course, have been heavily affected by UHI effects since the 1940’s.

For instance, much of the warming at Port Elizabeth in recent decades is
likely due to the siting of sensors in the middle of the runways
at the airport there.

Out of the ten stations mentioned above, there has been marked warming
trends introduced by adjustments at eight. One, De Aar shows little
change, but Upington, oddly enough, bucks the trend with a cooling trend
added. However, when the adjustments at all ten are averaged together,
the overall effect is obvious.

One oddity is the 1990’s period, when seemingly temperatures were over
adjusted up, only to be adjusted down since. It is one thing questioning
whether temperature measurements taken in the 1880’s were accurate, but
the 1990’s? Are we seriously saying they were understated by half a
degree? This is clearly a nonsense, and it goes to the heart of how
adjustments have corrupted the temperature dataset.

Global Warming Alarmists are about to gather in Paris for the biggest
climate carnival in their 21 year history – they hoped to see 25,000
official guests and 15,000 hangers on. Surely on their 21st birthday it
is time they grew up and faced some adult world problems.

Any urchin on the streets of Paris today could tell buffoons like Ban
Ki-moon and Barack Obama that the “biggest security threat facing the
world today” is NOT a miniscule increase in atmospheric plant food,
caused mainly by gentle natural global warming which has triggered minor
expulsion of carbon dioxide from the oceans.

Obama and his side kick Kerry call climate change the biggest threat to national security:

But the US Congress is not supporting the Paris party:

Radical Islamist terrorists just maimed and murdered hundreds of people
in Paris, dozens more in Mali, still more in other nations. They promise
more atrocities in the United States and around the globe.

Meanwhile some 40,000 bureaucrats, politicians, scientists, lobbyists,
activists and journalists plan to enjoy five-star Parisian hotels and
restaurants, while attending COP21, the twenty-first UN Climate Change
Conference, from November 30 through December 11. Like President Obama,
they insist that humanity faces no greater threat than climate change.
Some are even saying that ISIS attacked Paris to disrupt the climate
confab.

Napoleon once said: “Only a foolish horse fights with his nose bag”. But
today we have many foolish people fighting their nose bag. They are
weakening Earth’s food chain with a war on carbon.

Carbon is the building block of life. “Organic” means “containing
carbon” and every bit of plant and animal life is built around the
carbon atom.

Carbon enters Earth’s cycle of life via plants, which extract it from
the rare and precious carbon dioxide plant-food in the atmosphere.
Living things use this carbon, plus water, oxygen and minerals, to
create the proteins, fats, carbohydrates and skeletons they need.

Plant growth responds quickly to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

However, today’s levels are far below those that sustained the abundant
forests, grasslands, wetlands, herbivores and carnivores of past eras.

The biggest long term threat to abundant life on Earth is natural carbon
sequestration, especially during the recurring cold dry eras when
cooling oceans absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere, and growing ice sheets capture most of its water.

Nature is very efficient at carbon capture and burial. Enormous
quantities of carbon and hydrogen have been removed from past
atmospheres and buried under ancient sediments in extensive beds of
coal, oil shale, limestone, marble, dolomite and magnesite, and in
diffuse deposits of hydro-carbon liquids and gases. The result is that
the carbon dioxide level in today’s atmosphere is not far above the
minimum needed to sustain plant life (which is why nurserymen pump more
carbon dioxide into their green-houses).

However, in a rare piece of environmental serendipity, man’s extraction
and use of coal, oil, gas, limestone and dolomite for power generation,
transport, aviation, steel, cement and fertilisers is recycling a tiny
part of this storehouse of buried carbon. For example, for every tonne
of coal burned, 2.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide plant food plus one tonne
of fresh water is added to the atmosphere; and producing one tonne of
cement releases about one tonne of carbon dioxide.

Every tonne of wheat grown needs a tonne of carbon dioxide just to get
the carbon for the grains, and other foods have similar needs. Carbon
industries thus help to feed all of Earth’s plants and animals.

Industrial use of carbon-bearing mineral resources also recycles other
essential nutrients such as nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus which are
present in variable amounts in coal, oil and carbonates. Any of these
by-product gases can be toxic if concentrated in confined spaces, and
all of man’s activities can pollute crowded cities, but in the open
atmosphere, plant life often suffers because of a deficiency of these
key elements.

Those waging a war on hydro-carbons and carbon dioxide are enemies of
the biosphere. Their foolish policies like carbon taxes, emissions
trading and “Carbon Capture and Burial” are denying essential nutrients
to the food chain.

The failed global warming forecasts show that these policies will have
no effect on climate, but will reduce the atmospheric supply of food
nutrients and fresh water for all life on Earth.

The carbon promises of the Australian Left will hit the cost of living

Bill Shorten has sparked a polit­ical fight over the cost of living
after setting a climate change target that could impose a cost burden 10
times greater than Julia Gillard’s carbon tax.

The new Labor target was branded “way out of range” of other countries
as world leaders prepare to meet in Paris on Monday to try to agree on a
united plan to address global warming.

Labor is defending its goal of a 45 per cent cut in Australia’s
greenhouse gas emissions by insisting­ it will not need an expensiv­e
price on carbon that drives up household energy bills.

In a break from bipartisanship on previous targets, Labor’s ambition is
almost twice the size of the government’s offic­ial goal of cutting
carbon pollution by 26-28 per cent, which Malcolm Turnbull will
reiterate when he attends the Paris talks.

The Opposition Leader’s move prompted concerns yesterday that a partisan
brawl over competing targets would damage the prospects for real action
on climate change, frightening investors and making a consensus more
difficult.

Former Reserve Bank board member Warwick McKibbin, the author of a
detailed economic study of climate change targets, warned that the Labor
plan went too far beyond the commitments being made by similar nations.

Professor McKibbin estimated that the Labor goal would need a carbon
price of $200 a tonne without access to inter­national credits — almost
10 times the $23 fixed price in Ms Gillard’s carbon pricing scheme four
years ago.

While only an early estimate, the $200 figure is a like-for-like
comparison in today’s dollars based on the fact that the carbon tax only
needed to achieve a 5 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020.

Mr Shorten said yesterday that Labor would set up an “internationally
linked” emissions trading scheme, suggesting it could allow the purchase
of permits that might keep the price down. The new Labor and Coal­ition
targets aim to cut carbon emissions by 2030, compared with the base
year of 2005.

Professor McKibbin, who holds the chair in public policy at the Centre
for Applied Macro­economic Analysis at the Australian National
University, said Labor’s target was “far more than any other country”
was planning at Paris.

“Why would you go much harder than everyone else when it’s the global target that matters?” he asked.

“At the moment, Australia is contributing a greater economic loss than
other countries with the 26-28 per cent target. To be going further out
in front is not good policy.”

The Labor target compares with commitments by Japan (25 per cent), the US (41 per cent) and Europe (34 per cent).

Frontier Economics director Danny Price said the real impact on
Australians was greater on a per-capita basis and showed that Labor was
too far ahead of other countries. “The problem with such tough targets
and high costs is that they generate objections to clim­ate change
policies,” said Mr Price, an expert in the carbon pricing debate over
the past decade.

“You can see why Labor’s doing it, because they want to appeal to
Labor/Green voters. But in appealing to those voters it makes the
actual­ implementation of the policy less likely.”

The Business Council of Australia and the Australian Industry Group
welcomed the chance to consult with Labor on the new target, but the
Minerals Council of Australia dismissed it as an “ambit claim” and
favoured the government plan instead.

Climate Institute chief John Connor said the Labor target was “stronger
and more credible” and would achieve the agreed inter­national goal of
preventing global temperatures rising by 2C — something he said the
government target would not do.

The Climate Change Author­ity, set up by Labor, recommends a cut of 40-60 per cent.

Labor is yet to reveal how its ETS would work or what price it would
set, the key factor in shaping the cost impact on households.

Professor McKibbin’s economic analysis with the Department of Foreign
Affairs and Trade this year found that a 26 per cent target would trim
0.6 per cent from gross domestic product in 2030 while a 45 per cent
target would trim 1 per cent from GDP instead.

Given that the government’s Intergenerational Report forecasts GDP to
reach about $3 trillion in 2030, Labor’s target would in theory cost $30
billion in forgone economic output in that year. The government target
would cost $18bn. Economic growth continues under both targets.

Mr Shorten countered the idea that his target would hurt the economy,
saying “this modelling took no account of the ­economic consequences of
not adopting this sort of target”.

Setting out his policy in a speech to the Lowy Institute in Sydney
yesterday, Mr Shorten made it clear there would be help for families to
deal with the costs.

“We will undertake this process mindful of the consequences for jobs, for regions and for any impact­s on households,” he said.

Labor also argues it will not have to rely only on an ETS to reach its
target because of its commitment to make renewable energy account for
half of all power by 2030.

Scott Morrison warned of the economic damage from the Labor plan while
Industry Minister Christopher Pyne said the policy would “smash
household budgets” and the economy by re­introducing a carbon tax. Labor
rejected­ the claim that its ETS would be a carbon tax, citing a
comment from the Prime Minister in September that drew a distinction
between a carbon tax and an ETS and other mechanisms to reduce
emissions.

Preserving
the graphics: Most graphics on this site are hotlinked from
elsewhere. But hotlinked graphics sometimes have only a short life
-- as little as a week in some cases. After that they no longer
come up. From January 2011 on, therefore, I have posted a monthly
copy of everything on this blog to a separate site where I can host text
and graphics together -- which should make the graphics available even
if they are no longer coming up on this site. See here or here

*****************************************

BACKGROUND NOTES

This site is in favour of things that ARE good for the environment. That
the usual Greenie causes are good for the environment is however
disputed. Greenie policies can in fact be actively bad for the
environment -- as with biofuels, for instance

Context for the minute average temperature change recorded: At any
given time surface air temperatures around the world range over about
100°C. Even in the same place they can vary by nearly that much
seasonally and as much as 30°C or more in a day. A minute rise in
average temperature in that context is trivial if it is not meaningless
altogether. Scientists are Warmists for the money it brings in, not
because of the facts

"When it comes to alarmism, we’re all deniers; when it comes to climate change, none of us are" -- Dick Lindzen

The EPA does everything it can get away with to shaft America and Americans

Cromwell's famous plea: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think
it possible you may be mistaken" was ignored by those to whom it was
addressed -- to their great woe. Warmists too will not consider that
they may be wrong ..... "Bowels" was a metaphor for compassion in those
days

Warmism is a powerful religion that aims to control most of our lives. It is nearly as powerful as the Catholic Church once was

Leftists have faith that warming will come back some day. And they mock
Christians for believing in the second coming of Christ! They
obviously need religion

Global warming has in fact been a religious doctrine for over a century.
Even Charles Taze Russell, the founder of Jehovah's Witnesses,
believed in it

A rosary for the church of global warming (Formerly the Catholic
church): "Hail warming, full of grace, blessed art thou among climates
and blessed is the fruit of thy womb panic"

Pope Francis is to the Catholic church what Obama is to America -- a mistake, a fool and a wrecker

This Blog by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia.

I am the most complete atheist you can imagine. I don't believe in Karl
Marx, Jesus Christ or global warming. And I also don't believe in the
unhealthiness of salt, sugar and fat. How skeptical can you get? If
sugar is bad we are all dead

Inorganic Origin of Petroleum: "The theory of Inorganic Origin of
Petroleum (synonyms: abiogenic, abiotic, abyssal, endogenous, juvenile,
mineral, primordial) states that petroleum and natural gas was formed by
non-biological processes deep in the Earth, crust and mantle. This
contradicts the traditional view that the oil would be a "fossil fuel"
produced by remnants of ancient organisms. Oil is a hydrocarbon mixture
in which a major constituent is methane CH4 (a molecule composed of one
carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). Occurrence of methane is
common in Earth's interior and in space. The inorganic
theory contrasts with the ideas that posit exhaustion of oil (Peak Oil),
which assumes that the oil would be formed from biological processes
and thus would occur only in small quantities and sets, tending to
exhaust. Some oil drilling now goes 7 miles down, miles below any fossil
layers

As the Italian chemist Primo Levi reflected in Auschwitz, carbon is ‘the
only element that can bind itself in long stable chains without a great
expense of energy, and for life on Earth (the only one we know so far)
precisely long chains are required. Therefore carbon is the key element
of living substance.’ The chemistry of carbon (2) gives it a unique
versatility, not just in the artificial world, but also, and above all,
in the animal, vegetable and – speak it loud! – human kingdoms.

David Archibald: "The more carbon dioxide we can put into the
atmosphere, the better life on Earth will be for human beings and all
other living things."

WISDOM:

Consensus is invoked only in situations where the science is not solid enough - Michael Crichton

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of the experts" – Richard Feynman

"The desire to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule it" -- H L Mencken

'Nothing is more terrible than ignorance in action' -- Goethe

“Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.” -- Voltaire

Lord Salisbury: "No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by
experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you
believe doctors, nothing is wholesome; if you believe theologians,
nothing is innocent; if you believe soldiers, nothing is safe."

Calvin Coolidge said, "If you see 10 troubles coming down the road, you can be sure that nine will run into the ditch before they reach you." He could have been talking about Warmists.

Some advice from long ago for Warmists: "If ifs and ans were pots and pans,there'd be no room for tinkers".
It's a nursery rhyme harking back to Middle English times when "an"
could mean "if". Tinkers were semi-skilled itinerant workers who fixed
holes and handles in pots and pans -- which were valuable household
items for most of our history. Warmists are very big on "ifs", mays",
"might" etc. But all sorts of things "may" happen, including global
cooling

Bertrand Russell knew about consensus: "The fact that an opinion has
been widely held is no evidence whatever that it is not utterly absurd;
indeed in view of the silliness of the majority of mankind, a
widespread belief is more likely to be foolish than sensible.”

There goes another beautiful theory about to be murdered by a brutal gang of facts. - Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French writer and moralist (1613-1680)

"Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate" -- William of Occam

Was Paracelsus a 16th century libertarian? His motto was: "Alterius non sit qui suus esse potest"
which means "Let no man belong to another who can belong to himself."
He was certainly a rebel in his rejection of authority and his reliance
on observable facts and is as such one of the founders of modern
medicine

"In science, refuting an accepted belief is celebrated as an advance in knowledge; in religion it is condemned as heresy". (Bob Parks, Physics, U of Maryland). No prizes for guessing how global warming skepticism is normally responded to.

"Almost all professors of the arts and sciences are egregiously conceited, and derive their happiness from their conceit" -- Erasmus

"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to
acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of
duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin." -- Thomas H. Huxley

Time was, people warning the world "Repent - the end is
nigh!" were snickered at as fruitcakes. Now they own the media and run
the schools.

"One of the sources of the Fascist movement is the desire to avoid a too-rational and too-comfortable world" -- George Orwell, 1943 in Can Socialists Be Happy?

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics
are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts -- Bertrand Russell

“Affordable energy in ample quantities is the lifeblood of
the industrial societies and a prerequisite for the economic development
of the others.” -- John P. Holdren, Science Adviser to President Obama. Published in Science 9 February 2001

The closer science looks at the real world processes involved in
climate regulation the more absurd the IPCC's computer driven fairy tale
appears. Instead of blithely modeling climate based on hunches and
suppositions, climate scientists would be better off abandoning their
ivory towers and actually measuring what happens in the real world.' -- Doug L Hoffman

Something no Warmist could take on board: "Knuth once warned a correspondent, "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Prof. Donald Knuth, whom some regard as the world's smartest man

"To be green is to be irrational, misanthropic and morally defective.
They are the barbarians at the gate we have to stand against" -- Rich Kozlovich

ABOUT:

This is one of TWO skeptical blogs that I update daily. During my
research career as a social scientist, I was appalled at how much
writing in my field was scientifically lacking -- and I often said so in
detail in the many academic journal articles I had published in that
field. I eventually gave up social science research, however, because
no data ever seemed to change the views of its practitioners. I hoped
that such obtuseness was confined to the social scientists but now that I
have shifted my attention to health related science and climate
related science, I find the same impermeability to facts and logic.
Hence this blog and my FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC
blog. I may add that I did not come to either health or environmental
research entirely without credentials. I had several academic papers
published in both fields during my social science research career

Update: After 8 years of confronting the frankly childish standard of
reasoning that pervades the medical journals, I have given up. I have
put the blog into hibernation. In extreme cases I may put up here some
of the more egregious examples of medical "wisdom" that I encounter.
Greenies and food freaks seem to be largely coterminous. My regular
bacon & egg breakfasts would certainly offend both -- if only
because of the resultant methane output

Since my academic background is in the social sciences, it is
reasonable to ask what a social scientist is doing talking about global
warming. My view is that my expertise is the most relevant of all. It
seems clear to me from what you will see on this blog that belief in
global warming is very poorly explained by history, chemistry, physics
or statistics.

Warmism is prophecy, not science. Science cannot foretell the future.
Science can make very accurate predictions based on known regularities
in nature (e.g. predicting the orbits of the inner planets) but Warmism
is the exact opposite of that. It predicts a DEPARTURE from the known
regularities of nature. If we go by the regularities of nature, we are
on the brink of an ice age.

And from a philosophy of science viewpoint, far from being "the
science", Warmism is not even an attempt at a factual statement, let
alone being science. It is not a meaningful statement about the world.
Why? Because it is unfalsifiable -- making it a religious, not a
scientific statement. To be a scientific statement, there would have to
be some conceivable event that disproved it -- but there appears to be
none. ANY event is hailed by Warmists as proving their contentions.
Only if Warmists were able to specify some fact or event that would
disprove their theory would it have any claim to being a scientific
statement. So the explanation for Warmist beliefs has to be primarily a
psychological and political one -- which makes it my field

And, after all, Al Gore's academic qualifications are in social science also -- albeit very pissant qualifications.

A "geriatric" revolt: The scientists who reject Warmism tend to
be OLD! Your present blogger is one of those. There are tremendous
pressures to conformity in academe and the generally Leftist orientation
of academe tends to pressure everyone within it to agree to ideas that
suit the Left. And Warmism is certainly one of those ideas. So old
guys are the only ones who can AFFORD to declare the Warmists to be
unclothed. They either have their careers well-established (with
tenure) or have reached financial independence (retirement) and so can
afford to call it like they see it. In general, seniors in society
today are not remotely as helpful to younger people as they once were.
But their opposition to the Warmist hysteria will one day show that
seniors are not completely irrelevant after all. Experience does count
(we have seen many such hysterias in the past and we have a broader
base of knowledge to call on) and our independence is certainly an
enormous strength. Some of us are already dead. (Reid Bryson and John Daly are particularly mourned) and some of us are very senior indeed (e.g. Bill Gray and Vince Gray) but the revolt we have fostered is ever growing so we have not labored in vain.

Jimmy Carter Classic Quote from 1977: "Because we are now running out
of gas and oil, we must prepare quickly for a third change, to strict
conservation and to the use of coal and permanent renewable energy
sources, like solar power.

SOME POINTS TO PONDER:

Today’s environmental movement is the current manifestation of the
totalitarian impulse. It is ironic that the same people who condemn the
black or brown shirts of the pre WW2 period are blind to the current
manifestation simply because the shirts are green.

Climate is just the sum of weather. So if you cannot forecast the
weather a month in advance, you will not be able to forecast the climate
50 years in advance. And official meteorologists such as Britain's Met
Office and Australia's BOM, are very poor forecasters of weather. The
Met office has in fact given up on making seasonal forecasts because
they have so often got such forecasts embarrassingly wrong. Their
global-warming-powered "models" just did not deliver

Hearing a Government Funded Scientist say let me tell you the truth, is
like hearing a Used Car Salesman saying let me tell you the truth.

A strange Green/Left conceit: They seem to think (e.g. here)
that no-one should spend money opposing them and that conservative
donors must not support the election campaigns of Congressmen they
agree with

After three exceptionally cold winters in the Northern hemisphere, the
Warmists are chanting: "Warming causes cold". Even if we give that a
pass for logic, it still inspires the question: "Well, what are we
worried about"? Cold is not going to melt the icecaps is it?"

It's a central (but unproven) assumption of the Warmist "models" that
clouds cause warming. Odd that it seems to cool the temperature down
when clouds appear overhead!

To make out that the essentially trivial warming of the last 150 years
poses some sort of threat, Warmists postulate positive feedbacks that
might cut in to make the warming accelerate in the near future. Amid
their theories about feedbacks, however, they ignore the one feedback
that is no theory: The reaction of plants to CO2. Plants gobble up CO2
and the more CO2 there is the more plants will flourish and hence
gobble up yet more CO2. And the increasing crop yields of recent years
show that plantlife is already flourishing more. The recent rise in CO2
will therefore soon be gobbled up and will no longer be around to
bother anyone. Plants provide a huge NEGATIVE feedback in response to
increases in atmospheric CO2

Every green plant around us is made out of carbon dioxide that the
plant has grabbed out of the atmosphere. That the plant can get its
carbon from such a trace gas is one of the miracles of life. It
admittedly uses the huge power of the sun to accomplish such a vast
filtrative task but the fact that a dumb plant can harness the power of
the sun so effectively is also a wonder. We live on a rather
improbable planet. If a science fiction writer elsewhere in the
universe described a world like ours he might well be ridiculed for
making up such an implausible tale.

Greenies are the sand in the gears of modern civilization -- and they intend to be.

The Greenie message is entirely emotional and devoid of all
logic. They say that polar ice will melt and cause a big sea-level
rise. Yet 91% of the world's glacial ice is in Antarctica, where the
average temperature is around minus 40 degrees Celsius. The melting
point of ice is zero degrees. So for the ice to melt on any scale the
Antarctic temperature would need to rise by around 40 degrees, which
NOBODY is predicting. The median Greenie prediction is about 4 degrees.
So where is the huge sea level rise going to come from? Mars? And
the North polar area is mostly sea ice and melting sea ice does not
raise the sea level at all. Yet Warmists constantly hail any sign of
Arctic melting. That the melting of floating ice does not raise the
water level is known as Archimedes' principle. Archimedes demonstrated
it around 2,500 years ago. That Warmists have not yet caught up with
that must be just about the most inspissated ignorance imaginable. The
whole Warmist scare defies the most basic physics. Yet at the opening
of 2011 we find the following unashamed lying by James Hansen:
"We will lose all the ice in the polar ice cap in a couple of
decades". Sadly, what the Vulgate says in John 1:5 is still only very
partially true: "Lux in tenebris lucet". There is still much darkness in the minds of men.

The repeated refusal of Warmist "scientists" to make their raw
data available to critics is such a breach of scientific protocol that
it amounts to a confession in itself. Note, for instance Phil Jones'
Feb 21, 2005 response to Warwick Hughes' request for his raw climate
data: "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make
the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something
wrong with it?" Looking for things that might be wrong with a given
conclusion is of course central to science. But Warmism cannot survive
such scrutiny. So even after "Climategate", the secrecy goes on.

Most Greenie causes are at best distractions from real
environmental concerns (such as land degradation) and are more
motivated by a hatred of people than by any care for the environment

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity
that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence
showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

‘Global warming’ has become the grand political narrative of
the age, replacing Marxism as a dominant force for controlling liberty
and human choices. -- Prof. P. Stott

The modern environmental movement arose out of the wreckage of
the New Left. They call themselves Green because they're too yellow to
admit they're really Reds. So Lenin's birthday was chosen to be the
date of Earth Day. Even a moderate politician like Al Gore has been
clear as to what is needed. In "Earth in the Balance", he wrote that
saving the planet would require a "wrenching transformation of
society".

For centuries there was a scientific consensus which said that
fire was explained by the release of an invisible element called
phlogiston. That theory is universally ridiculed today. Global warming
is the new phlogiston. Though, now that we know how deliberate the
hoax has been, it might be more accurate to call global warming the New Piltdown Man. The Piltdown hoax took 40 years to unwind. I wonder....

Motives: Many people would like to be kind to others so
Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people
want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing
all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the
real motive is generally to promote themselves as wiser and better
than everyone else, truth regardless.

Policies: The only underlying theme that makes sense of all
Greenie policies is hatred of people. Hatred of other people has been a
Greenie theme from way back. In a report titled "The First Global
Revolution" (1991, p. 104) published by the "Club of Rome", a Greenie
panic outfit, we find the following statement: "In searching for a
new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the
threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit
the bill.... All these dangers are caused by human intervention... The
real enemy, then, is humanity itself." See here for many more examples of prominent Greenies saying how much and how furiously they hate you.

After fighting a 70 year war to destroy red communism we face another
life-or-death struggle in the 21st century against green communism.

The conventional wisdom of the day is often spectacularly wrong. The
most popular and successful opera of all time is undoubtedly "Carmen" by
Georges Bizet. Yet it was much criticized when first performed and the
unfortunate Bizet died believing that it was a flop. Similarly, when
the most iconic piece of 20th century music was first performed in
1913-- Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" -- half the audience walked out.
Those of us who defy the conventional wisdom about climate are actually
better off than that. Unlike Bizet and Stravinsky in 1913, we KNOW that
we will eventually be vindicated -- because all that supports Warmism
is a crumbling edifice of guesswork ("models").

Al Gore won a political prize for an alleged work of science. That rather speaks for itself, doesn't it?

Jim Hansen and his twin

Getting rich and famous through alarmism: Al Gore is well-known but note
also James Hansen. He has for decades been a senior, presumably
well-paid, employee at NASA. In 2001 he was the recipient of a $250,000 Heinz Award. In 2007 Time magazine designated him a Hero of the Environment. That same year he pocketed one-third of a $1 million Dan David Prize. In 2008, the American Association for the Advancement of Science presented him with its Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award. In 2010 he landed a $100,000 Sophie Prize. He pulled in a total of $1.2 million in 2010. Not bad for a government bureaucrat.

See the original global Warmist in action here: "The icecaps are melting and all world is drowning to wash away the sin"

I am not a global warming skeptic nor am I a global warming
denier. I am a global warming atheist. I don't believe one bit of it.
That the earth's climate changes is undeniable. Only ignoramuses
believe that climate stability is normal. But I see NO evidence to say
that mankind has had anything to do with any of the changes observed --
and much evidence against that claim.

Seeing that we are all made of carbon, the time will come when
people will look back on the carbon phobia of the early 21st century as
too incredible to be believed

Meanwhile, however, let me venture a tentative prophecy.
Prophecies are almost always wrong but here goes: Given the common
hatred of carbon (Warmists) and salt (Food freaks) and given the fact
that we are all made of carbon, salt, water and calcium (with a few
additives), I am going to prophecy that at some time in the future a
hatred of nitrogen will emerge. Why? Because most of the air that we
breathe is nitrogen. We live at the bottom of a nitrogen sea. Logical
to hate nitrogen? NO. But probable: Maybe. The Green/Left is mad
enough. After all, nitrogen is a CHEMICAL -- and we can't have that!

The intellectual Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (AD 121-180)
must have foreseen Global Warmism. He said: "The object in life is not
to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the
ranks of the insane."

The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research
grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of
money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some
belief in global warming?

For many people, global warming seems to have taken the place of
"The Jews" -- a convenient but false explanation for any disliked
event. Prof. Brignell has some examples.

Global warming skeptics are real party-poopers. It's so wonderful to believe that you have a mission to save the world.

There is an "ascetic instinct" (or perhaps a "survivalist
instinct") in many people that causes them to delight in going without
material comforts. Monasteries and nunneries were once full of such
people -- with the Byzantine stylites perhaps the most striking example.
Many Greenies (other than Al Gore and his Hollywood pals) have that
instinct too but in the absence of strong orthodox religious
committments they have to convince themselves that the world NEEDS them
to live in an ascetic way. So their personal emotional needs lead them
to press on us all a delusional belief that the planet needs "saving".

The claim that oil is a fossil fuel is another great myth and
folly of the age. They are now finding oil at around seven MILES
beneath the sea bed -- which is incomparably further down than any
known fossil. The abiotic oil theory is not as yet well enough
developed to generate useful predictions but that is also true of fossil
fuel theory

Green/Left denial of the facts explained: "Rejection lies in this,
that when the light came into the world men preferred darkness to light;
preferred it, because their doings were evil. Anyone who acts
shamefully hates the light, will not come into the light, for fear that
his doings will be found out. Whereas the man whose life is true comes
to the light" John 3:19-21 (Knox)

Against the long history of huge temperature variation in the
earth's climate (ice ages etc.), the .6 of one degree average rise
reported by the U.N. "experts" for the entire 20th century (a rise so
small that you would not be able to detect such a difference personally
without instruments) shows, if anything, that the 20th century was a
time of exceptional temperature stability.

Recent NASA figures
tell us that there was NO warming trend in the USA during the 20th
century. If global warming is occurring, how come it forgot the USA?

Warmists say that the revised NASA figures do not matter because
they cover only the USA -- and the rest of the world is warming nicely.
But it is not. There has NEVER been any evidence that the Southern
hemisphere is warming. See here. So the warming pattern sure is looking moth-eaten.

The latest scare is the possible effect of extra CO2 on the
world’s oceans, because more CO2 lowers the pH of seawater. While it is
claimed that this makes the water more acidic, this is misleading. Since
seawater has a pH around 8.1, it will take an awful lot of CO2 it to
even make the water neutral (pH=7), let alone acidic (pH less than 7).

In fact, ocean acidification is a scientific impossibility.
Henry's Law mandates that warming oceans will outgas CO2 to the
atmosphere (as the UN's own documents predict it will), making the
oceans less acid. Also, more CO2 would increase calcification rates. No
comprehensive, reliable measurement of worldwide oceanic acid/base
balance has ever been carried out: therefore, there is no observational
basis for the computer models' guess that acidification of 0.1 pH units
has occurred in recent decades.

The chaos theory people have told us for years that the air
movement from a single butterfly's wing in Brazil can cause an
unforeseen change in our weather here. Now we are told that climate
experts can "model" the input of zillions of such incalculable variables
over periods of decades to accurately forecast global warming 50 years
hence. Give us all a break!

Scientists have politics too -- sometimes extreme politics. Read this: "This
crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism... I
am convinced there is only one way to eliminate these grave evils,
namely through the establishment of a socialist economy, accompanied by
an educational system which would be oriented toward social goals. In
such an economy, the means of production are owned by society itself and
are utilized in a planned fashion. A planned economy, which adjusts
production to the needs of the community, would distribute the work to
be done among all those able to work and would guarantee a livelihood to
every man, woman, and child." -- Albert Einstein

The Lockwood & Froehlich paper
was designed to rebut Durkin's "Great Global Warming Swindle" film.
It is a rather confused paper -- acknowledging yet failing to account
fully for the damping effect of the oceans, for instance -- but it is
nonetheless valuable to climate atheists. The concession from a
Greenie source that fluctuations in the output of the sun have driven
climate change for all but the last 20 years (See the first sentence of
the paper) really is invaluable. And the basic fact presented in the
paper -- that solar output has in general been on the downturn in
recent years -- is also amusing to see. Surely even a crazed Greenie
mind must see that the sun's influence has not stopped and that
reduced solar output will soon start COOLING the earth! Unprecedented
July 2007 cold weather throughout the Southern hemisphere might even
have been the first sign that the cooling is happening. And the fact
that warming plateaued in 1998 is also a good sign that we are moving
into a cooling phase. As is so often the case, the Greenies have got
the danger exactly backwards. See my post of 7.14.07 and very detailed critiques here and here and here for more on the Lockwood paper and its weaknesses.

As the Greenies are now learning, even strong statistical correlations may disappear if a longer time series is used. A remarkable example from Sociology:"The
modern literature on hate crimes began with a remarkable 1933 book by
Arthur Raper titled The Tragedy of Lynching. Raper assembled data on the
number of lynchings each year in the South and on the price of an
acre’s yield of cotton. He calculated the correla­tion coefficient
between the two series at –0.532. In other words, when the economy was
doing well, the number of lynchings was lower.... In 2001, Donald Green,
Laurence McFalls, and Jennifer Smith published a paper that demolished
the alleged connection between economic condi­tions and lynchings in
Raper’s data. Raper had the misfortune of stopping his anal­ysis in
1929. After the Great Depression hit, the price of cotton plummeted and
economic condi­tions deteriorated, yet lynchings continued to fall. The
correlation disappeared altogether when more years of data were added."
So we must be sure to base our conclusions on ALL the data. In the
Greenie case, the correlation between CO2 rise and global temperature
rise stopped in 1998 -- but that could have been foreseen if
measurements taken in the first half of the 20th century had been
considered.

Greenie-approved sources of electricity (windmills and solar
cells) require heavy government subsidies to be competitive with normal
electricity generators so a Dutch word for Greenie power seems graphic
to me: "subsidieslurpers" (subsidy gobblers)

There are also two blogspot blogs which record what I think are my main recent articles here and here. Similar content can be more conveniently accessed via my subject-indexed list of short articles here or here (I rarely write long articles these days)

Note: If the link to one of my articles is not working, the
article concerned can generally be viewed by prefixing to the filename
the following: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/42197/20121106-1520/jonjayray.comuv.com/